Ask HN: How to License My Program - <AUTHOR>

I have spent the last few months working on a program for a friend of mine who is an investment banker. His company uses an online service to track deals and allegedly provide meaningful statistics back for them, however the system does not correctly combine the data in a way useful to them. My program gets the raw data and combines it into what they would like to know. He mentioned recently that he knows many other people in their same situation that would benefit from my program, and encouraged me see if I can make any more money off of it. Knowing little about the business side of programming, my questions are: 1) Should I license my program in order to protect myself? 2) What license should I use? (There is no disagreement on ownership, as my friend recognizes the work as my intellectual property (Should I get this in writing? (I wonder if this guy knows lisp...)))
Thank you for any advice or wisdom you can give. <comment><USER2> Who owns the IP of the program? (you, your friend, his employer?) Does the program contain anyone else's IP? Do you have a business model to extract revenue from your program? Have you considered selling a service rather than a license - something more like a newsletter or other subscription-based process?

<comment><AUTHOR> The IP is mine, as all of the code has been written by myself or is available under the MIT License. My friend is the owner of the company, does not claim the IP at all.

The nature of the program is that it is useful in that given a period of time, it can tell the user various statistics of their dealings. Target users would want to be able to generate this data at will, and so I don't think a subscription service would be useful.</comment></comment>


Computer science engineer wanted for start-up - <AUTHOR>

I am a recent graduate and am pursuing a start up venture. I have a vision and am trying to put together a team. I am looking for an expert programmer/hacker(preferably a student or recent grad)who can help create and refine my vision. I lack the technical skills to create this on my own. I can organize, manage, and promote. I am envisioning a cloud based social media content platform, I believe this is going to change the game and will allow for the opportunity to compete in the subscription content delivery market($66B)
contact me Nick:(707)217-1348 firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> Why should anyone want to join your startup rather than creating their own?

<comment><AUTHOR> They would have to decide if they believed in the vision, and if they believed in my ability to contribute something valuable that they could not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Unless you're bringing a boatload of money as well, you will only be contributing about 10% to the startup. Perhaps you should look for a startup to join instead of the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER4> sadly, I've met SO many people that have tried to get me involved in projects like this.

They are the "ideas" guy. They have a great idea, but no technical skill to complete it. I would gladly partner with someone if they have:

-connections in the business -money -some other skill that will greatly benefit the partnership

</comment><comment><USER5> I honestly can't tell if this is supposed to be satire.</comment>


IOS 6 Adoption Rates Soar Following Google Maps Release - <AUTHOR> http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/12/20/2329233/ios-6-adoption-rates-soar-following-google-maps-release?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

<comment><AUTHOR> Source is at: [http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-ios-6-adoption-rate-soars- follo...](http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-ios-6-adoption-rate-soars-following- google-maps-release-955120) but HN insta-killed it for some reason.</comment>


Multiverse: have astronomers found evidence of parallel universes? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/2017/may/17/multiverse-have-astronomers-found-evidence-of-parallel-universes <comment><USER2> It continues to boggle my mind that when further evidence arises to confound the current majority theory (in any field), additional undetectable entities are added to keep the majority theory going.

Mayhaps, if some of these brilliant thinkers actually took a step back, they might get a completely different perspective.

That is hoping too much, I suppose. What's that old adage? If a man's job depends on him believing an idea, he's unlikely to look at anything different.</comment>


Show HN: please review our MacRuby app, "spotlight for web apps"  - <AUTHOR>

We love the idea of Greplin, but we wanted to search directly from our desktops. Redwood is the result.
Redwood is a "Spotlight for your web apps" -- it searches Basecamp, GMail, and GDocs from one search bar on your desktop. We'll add more sources going forward. Or, you'll be able to write your own plugins in Ruby, to search whatever you want. Download: http://redwoodapp.com/system/Redwood.zip. OSX 10.6 or later required.
## A little technical background on the app:
* It's written primarily in MacRuby 0.10 (trunk). You don't need MacRuby installed -- it's embedded in the application bundle.
* We use two gems: Nokogiri and GData, also embedded in the application bundle. We use macruby_deploy --gem, which makes gem bundling a breeze.
* We use a few Obj-C libraries: Sqlite3 for DB, FMDB for DB wrapper, ASIHTTPRequest for HTTP.
* the UI is rendered primarily in HTML/CSS, and events are passed back and forth between an embedded Webview and Cocoa.
Please give it a whirl, we'd appreciate any feedback. Download link again: http://redwoodapp.com/system/Redwood.zip. <comment><USER2> I couldn't get it to authenticate my gmail account, I am using 2-step verification, tried both my password and application specific password.

<comment><AUTHOR> @shennyg, thanks for letting us know. We don't support accounts with two- factor authentication yet.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should we have an age limit on running for office? - <AUTHOR> I'm all for people staying in the workforce as long as they want, but public office, especially the presidency or the senate, feels different. I can't think of any major downsides. What am I missing? <comment><USER2> I think that age and general health, especially mental acuity, should be considered when voting, but I don't feel like it would be wise to try and set an age limit. There are many old people who despite their frail state would be great presidents and I would gladly vote for them as long as their VP was in good health and younger.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wanna ban Clint Eastwood from making movies too?

Also, creating an account to troll with this nonsense doesn't belong here

<comment><AUTHOR> Wasn't trying to troll, this was just my first time posting on HN. I was genuinely curious about the downsides, b/c of our 2020 presidential options.

Also, I said I'm all for peopling working as long as they want — I'm still bitter that my grandpa was age restricted out of being a pilot at 55.

It just seems like the presidency should have some standards and there's already an age minimum.

I love Clint and hope he works until the bitter end :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No. Candidate ages aren't secret and the voters have their chance to have their say when they vote. Age limits on lifetime appointments however would be a good idea as medical science keeps people living longer and often beyond the time of peak mental reasoning.

<comment><USER2> With this line of reasoning, would you be in favor of getting rid of the minimum age for running for office?

<comment><USER4> As long as the candidate had reached the age of majority, yes, I'd be fine with the few minimum age restrictions that exist being removed. In the 18th century information spread slowly and very unevenly. If a 20 year old wants to run for the Senate and the people of their state want to be represented by a 20 year old, I'm fine with that. There's no hiding that a 20 year old is 20 years old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's admitting democracy doesn't really work.

But it doesn't, so yes.

There are restrictions like citizenship which is required, so we already admit we don't trust the population to chose suitable candidates.

They are also head of the military, which has requirements I would think.

</comment><comment><USER6> i wonder how constructive it would be to require a physical/psych exam, just like any other job that has the potential to do grevious harm, such as driving a big rig, or air traffic control etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wanna ban Clint Eastwood from making movies too?

</comment><comment><USER7> An IQ test would be a good too, 50 should be the maximum age for a candidate,</comment>


Web Authentication API - <AUTHOR> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Authentication_API <comment><USER4> For people confused about what this is: it's basically the de facto cross- browser standard for U2F security keys like Yubikeys.

<comment><USER5> More than that. Because it's an open standard it can be used with other types of authenticators, like password managers and platform-level security keys. There are also extensions allowing sites to prompt users for explicit authorization for a specific action. (e.g. "do you want to send $20 to xyz?")

In short, this could replace passwords for web authentication entirely.

<comment><USER6> If I'm not mistaken, the browsers themselves could act as "authenticators" and help people manage credentials in software.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. Authenticate with your Google account on chrome, iCloud account on safari, or Firefox account on Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if this API can be coaxed into providing a method of authentication for "the other" 99% of people and use cases, without a hardware token and in a device-independent fashion, _using passwords only_.

That may sound contradictory or that it misses the point, but let me explain. The password can be used to locally decrypt a secret key that is stored on the server at registration time, and that is retrieved based on the username provided. What this achieves is a login system that covers the way social login/Facebook/OAuth is used, without giving any power to a 3rd party. The password never leaves his machine and the user is not dependent on any particular hardware or keyring.

So for all those "I can't trust this website with a secure password / I can't be bothered to signup" cases, you will have a strong authentication scheme that is as secure as your (salted and stretched) master password, and where you are guaranteed that a compromise on one of the sites does not spill over to the rest. Unless you choose to reuse a username, your identities will be independent and unlinkable, unlike any social login scheme, preserving privacy. The user complexity is similar to what regular people already know, usernames and passwords - you can even safely reuse a strong password. The essential difference is that you should trust only your device / browser with the password, not the site.

<comment><USER9> Seems like in that scheme anyone can retrieve the encrypted secret without authentication (just by knowing the username), and then try to brute-force it at will.

<comment><USER8> In a real world implementation this can be easily avoided by breaking the retrieval query into a challenge-response like:

      retrieve_salt(username)
      retrieve_keyfile(username, encrypt(streched_password, salt, server_name))

So the offline, parallel crack turns into an online, serial and rate-limited bruteforce. The salt and password derived shared secret are established at account setup time and after any password change, which the browser must support too.

This still has some imperfections related to replay susceptibility, but my point isn't to design a protocol, rather the principle of a thing that could make social login obsolete and stone-age.

<comment><USER5> So now the server needs to store a copy of your stretched master password? How is it supposed to know whether the value of `encrypt(streched_password, salt, server_name)` is correct?

Why not just use public key authentication, like the Web Authentication standard already does?

<comment><USER8> >How is it supposed to know whether the value of `encrypt(streched_password, salt, server_name)` is correct?

By comparing it to the static value stored at account setup time. The server trusts your shared secret just like it trusts your public key - <USER2> the identity of a public key is a different problem with various solutions, CAs, WoT, directory servers etc. The idea here is to move from plain authentication (user/password) to a public key system without carrying the key material around, but deriving it when needed from your password.

<comment><USER5> So the server stores a copy of your encrypted keyfile, salt, and the result of `encrypt(streched_password, salt, server_name)`?

That's better, but still allows malicious sites (or anyone who compromises the database of a site you have an account on) to brute force your master password offline. Slightly better than reusing passwords since there's no danger of sites using a weak hash algorithm or storing your password in plaintext, but still not great.

IMO if you _really_ don't want to carry the key material around (which _does_ necessarily reduce security btw, as you're going from "something you have" \+ "something you know" to just "something you know", which is easier to steal and inherently susceptible to brute force), then it'd be much simpler to just derive a private key from `(user password, site id)` and use that with WebAuthn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Finally! I have a design concept that I wanted to propose but never got around it which would be very similar or even the complement, but without all the security details that I do not know how to do and that this API is strong on: [https://jsfiddle.net/franciscop/qj4g3rz8/](https://jsfiddle.net/franciscop/qj4g3rz8/)

The browser could store several data points for each field so you can choose from a dropdown OR different user profiles so you can switch from "Francisco the freelancer" to "Francisco the open source guy" in the drop of a beat. Or per window to do both at the same time if that's your thing.

But anyway, this new Web Authentication API is really, really awesome to remove passwords forever. Now we need the last one, which would be closer to my design concept to even remove the manually adding all those fields: Web Identity API.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is going to be _huge_ for the security of the average web user once it starts getting widespread adoption.

Credential phishing, password reuse, credential stuffing, and weak passwords are all about to be a thing of the past, at least insofar as the web is concerned.

<comment><USER11> Doesn't this mean that if the authenticator is cracked then all of your accounts are revealed and become vulnerable?

Compared to the situation today when if one your passwords is cracked they can't immeidately access your other accounts.

<comment><USER5> Stealing Web Authentication keys from a hardware token is a significantly higher bar than phishing you or brute-forcing your password hash from a database leak. At the very _least_ the attacker would first have to compromise your machine with malware, at which point they could easily get access to all your password-protected accounts anyway with a simple keylogger.

<comment><USER11> What happens if you lose your hardware token (or it gets stolen, ec.)? Is there a way for then to access your accounts?

<comment><USER12> Ideally (and hopefully this will be doable, as I don't see any impediments), you can have Bitcoin-wallet-style seed generation that you can back up onto a piece of paper and store it somewhere safe.

I really hope my Ledger Nano S becomes WebAuthN-compatible, as it can already be used as a U2F key.

<comment><USER13> Yes, for a device as complicated as the (~ $100) Ledger Nano S I don't see any reason they couldn't support that functionality.

Most people will be using much cheaper, dumb authenticators which aren't going to have the capability to read and update the keys, they would be expected to replace their authenticator altogether, not try to clone it if there's a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can you extract domain names and usernames from the U2F devices? Like if someone wants to learn what sites he is visiting and his usernames?

<comment><USER13> In practice, no, the tokens are _way_ too dumb to remember anything like that. They're using an old cryptographic trick to appear much cleverer than they really are.

During enrollment they present the server with a public key, and a magic cookie, both of which it stores. In subsequent authentication, the server sends them back the cookie, and some random data, which the token then signs to prove it still knows the private key, the server can check that because of the public key it has.

But in practice the key pair never actually lives inside the token - it makes the key pair during enrollment, and the "magic cookie" was actually its private key encrypted using a secret key only the token knows. So the token has no writeable storage, just ROM and a little bit of DRAM. Some tokens might have a tiny amount of flash to e.g. store a counter or a user chosen PIN to do PIN authentication instead of a one touch auth, but they aren't storing a bunch of keys, or domain names, or email addresses.

<comment><USER15> This is so cool.

This feels so much like cheating that I was sure it must be flawed, but I couldn't come up with any weakness.

I conviced myself that this is possible by considering the method of using a different permutation of the same key pair on each website and storing that permutation, encrypted, in a cookie.

Cryptography is awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Since TLS supports client certificates, I've always wondered why browsers never added UIs that would make that useable for end users.

<comment><USER17> It would be nice to have a JavaScript API that allows you to create a client certificate locally, generate a CSR, and install the signed certificate for automatic use when connecting back to the associated host?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a beginner in this area, but maybe someone can help me out. Would this be a replacement for something like Passport or Auth0?

<comment><USER19> Not exactly. It is an alternative to the concept of passwords in general. But it is not a complete solution to all the things covered by those services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone know when the Google websites will start using this? Would love to finally be able to use my Yubikey with Firefox and Google.

<comment><USER21> you can partialy (password + second factor authentication) use this when using 2FA with your Google account, [https://support.yubico.com/support/solutions/articles/150000...](https://support.yubico.com/support/solutions/articles/15000006418-using- your-yubikey-with-google)

<comment><USER20> Doesn't work with Firefox yet AFAIK. That page mentions requiring Google Chrome.

<comment><USER22> It works with Firefox 60, Google however sometimes relies on Chrome quirks not specified in the standard which may not make it usable in Firefox. (Last I checked)

<comment><USER20> It does not, and Google does not yet even attempt to use WebAuthn. They're still using the (now legacy) U2F authentication mechanism, which firefox does not fully support. It works in some sites if you enable it in about:config, but not all. Like google.com.

<comment><USER22> Hmm, yeah, I was more aiming at "Firefox has working WebAuthn in the newest Version, Google just doesn't use it properly or at all", I should have expressed that better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How is this related to this:

[https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/](https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/)

?

EDIT: found this relevant comment (I think) from yesterday's discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17030302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17030302)

<comment><USER12> The first sentence in TFA:

> The Web Authentication API (also referred to as WebAuthn)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone have any idea if this work is aligning with the Decentralized Identifier specification, or vise versa? [https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did- spec/](https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-spec/)

</comment><comment><USER25> If Microsoft allows Windows Hello to be used by Firefox, Chrome etc to enable this, this would be extremly huge. Same on mobile with Google & Apple.

Sadly i've got no idea how far away we are from this actually being implemented.

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks great for web content, but how does it support the workflow of signing up for a website on my browser and then downloading their mobile app, and signing in on the app without a password?

Or is that TBD?

<comment><USER13> If your authenticator is suitable for your mobile device, then it works with that device. If your authenticator is, say, a USB-A dongle for plugging into a PC it probably either can't be used, or is super-clumsy because it needs a big adaptor to hang off the device. They make things that do Bluetooth and USB-C though.

<comment><USER26> Gotcha. Although Apple and Google will likely need to build an API for this like they did for facial/fingerprint unlock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if you could use those keys also for encrypting content?

<comment><USER13> Not with this API. You can purchase objects which can do this AND handle say your GPG keys for encryption, but WebAuthn is deliberately narrowly scoped.

Using the same key for unrelated things can result in unpleasant surprises. So it's to be avoided.

If you have a crappy insecure email server that uses SSLv3 still, and uses the same key as your tightly locked down Web server with TLS 1.2 then this bites you really badly, I can use the email server to help me impersonate your web server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd be curious to know why it chooses to have a register step, why not just use the key of the authenticator/the relying ID as a proof of identity?

You would normally use a scheme like this so that websites cannot connect multiple identities together, but it seems pointless here because the pubkey will be signed with the user identity and the server will have logged your real pubkey

<comment><USER29> No, you were right at the beginning. There is no "root" or "real" pubkey. A separate keypair is generated each site, so that - like you said - <USER3> are unlinkable. This is also a crucial part of what makes these credentials immune to phishing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I proposed something similar a few years ago, glad to see it being incorporated into browsers:

[http://blog.codesolvent.com/2015/07/why-not-signed- password-...](http://blog.codesolvent.com/2015/07/why-not-signed-password- authentication.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> So the private key will be stored a device for signing in across a few platforms. But what if I need to sign in from another device? I can't do that until I go back home and copy the key over to my mobile?

</comment><comment><USER32> How costly are these devices ? Are these readily available in the market to buy ?

<comment><USER29> Yubico currently sells one at $20. [https://www.yubico.com/product/security- key-by-yubico/#secur...](https://www.yubico.com/product/security-key-by- yubico/#security-key-2-pack)

There are competing U2F keys, but I don't know of any competitors that support FIDO2 yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sigh, I got all excited, but then discovered this is to be used __with a server __, which means it fundamentally propagates the idea of "fake security" (where somebody else owns your identity, not you. Check out this explainer for more info: [https://gun.js.org/explainers/data/security.html](https://gun.js.org/explainers/data/security.html) ).

This is bad design philosophy, I instead encourage everybody to use the native Web Crypto API to create accounts and do P2P E2EE encryption.

Web Auth API does look a lot easier than Web Crypto API, but it pushes the wrong message. We've taken a lot of time to make an MIT/Zlib/Apache2 Open Source wrapper around Web Crypto API that allows better user security (better than Web Auth API), short tutorial here: [https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want- to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi...](https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build- a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8) .

<comment><USER34> Unfortunately average people are better off with a corporation holding onto their private keys. People already get annoyed when they forget their password. Telling them they have permanently lost access to their account/data because their hard disk broke or they lost their token is much worse.</comment></comment>


Yahoo knew of attacks before Google, kept mum - <AUTHOR> http://ca.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idCATRE60E5PQ20100116?sp=true

<comment><USER2> Is that surprising given Yahoo's history with China? If your not familiar, the reporter waited until the closing paragraphs to put this in proper context:

 _In 2007, Yahoo outraged human rights activists after accusations that the Internet giant had handed over the mail, data on online activity and Internet addresses of suspected dissidents to Chinese officials. Though Yahoo eventually settled the lawsuits brought by lawyers acting on behalf of jailed dissidents.

The suit, advanced by the Washington D.C.-based World Organization for Human Rights USA, maintained that Yahoo had benefited financially by working with Chinese authorities.

Yahoo also no longer maintains its own Internet site in China. In 2005, Yahoo handed over exclusive rights to the "Yahoo China" brand name and folded its Chinese mail, messaging and other operations into the Alibaba Group, in a $1 billion deal that gave Yahoo a 40 percent stake in Alibaba._

<comment><AUTHOR> In other words, Yahoo makes money in China indirectly so they can't be as easily blamed for their behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yahoo just rolls over and takes it. The sad thing is, when China is a profitable enough market, and companies who sucked up to the regime are ready to capitalize on their presence there, Yahoo itself will not be around to reap the benefits.

<comment><USER4> Like probably most other companies doing business in China, and probably for years.

Not defending it, just pointing out that this one decision of Yahoo's is, unfortunately, normal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who works at Yahoo I'm going to say I have no guilt over China. If you think China commits human rights violations stop doing business with them yourself. That means not buying anything made in China, including anything made by Apple.

The human rights abuses in China are sad, and upsetting. I'm a member of Amnesty and I care about stopping them. However, western business operating in China have an ability to change the market and increase the standard of living and the freedoms in that country through increased wealth and communication.

This story isn't (or shouldn't) be about Yahoo!'s operations in China it should be about co-operation between companies to prevent cyber-terrorism wherever it's from. I'd like to think next time we as a company are more forthcoming with information to others, so they have more notice of potential threats.

N.B These views are my own and don't necessarily represent Yahoo!'s views, yada, yada

<comment><USER6> Does it help China increase the standard of living when Yahoo gets human rights campaigners thrown in jail?

<comment><USER7> That depends whether the instability brought by poking a corrupt regime is good or bad. On the one hand the human rights campaigners could improve democracy and help bring China into the modern world, whilst on the other hand promoting the faults of their corrupt regime could easily result in anarchy and martial law if there was ever an uprising. The major problem here is that an uprising would quickly cause the cost of production to go through the roof in China, forcing virtually every industry to pull out of the country and relocate elsewhere. This major export hit to the Chinese economy could collapse their entire system, and disregarding the international effects, it could easily land China in the situation of North Korea.

Honestly, with the fact that China could so easily result in a massive North Korea, how would that help the standard of living?

China isn't a simple situation and assigning childish ethics to the country will resolve nothing. The simple allowance of unions in China could easily result in another global recession. A college strike here in Ontario is threatening the provinces recovery as it may delay the graduation of all those getting retrained due to the financial crisis. Simply imagine what happened if unionization occurred throughout China and the ramifications for the countries trade.

China is going to require baby steps to bring it into a democratic and free world, anything faster could be an international economic disaster on the scale of the great depression.

<comment><USER8>
      Simply imagine what happened if unionization occurred
      throughout China and the ramifications for the
      countries trade.

Unionization should occur. The Chinese government is using harsh methods to stop that. But the later it happens the worse the results will be for us.

      China is going to require baby steps to bring it
      into a democratic and free world

We don't need to be delicately careful as if China's a baby. The local human rights activists and upstanding corps like Google are very effective and non- aggressive ways of prodding it into a democratic and free world.

<comment><USER7> China needs unionization to occur slowly, spreading through key agencies like health care and steel production, rather than a mass unionization of its manufacturing sector. Japan and South Korea achieved unionization of its workforce rather admirably as it happened in key industry first that didn't have a major effect on its economy. A fast switch to unionization could easily cause western manufacturers switch to other south-east Asian countries or even to Africa.

Also, I wasn't advocating treating China like a baby, but I believe it is delicate. The actions of its local human rights activists, and Google (even when it wasn't taking its current stance) were forces for good in the country.

The last thing we need with China is an economic collapse of the country, or a regressionist movement that forces them down a path similar to North Korea. However, I do believe Western governments have to start taking a more hard- line approach when dealing with China. The government can't be given the "Oh it's just China" treatment like parent's saying "Boys will be boys" that it is currently getting. It's almost like the country gets allowed to do what it wants because it's communist, but unlike the USSR was, it isn't militarily aggressive towards the west.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      "I don't understand how that helps anything. I don't
       understand how that helps us and I don't understand
       how that helps China," Ballmer said.

With a quote like that, you have no idea what question Ballmer was asked, what exactly "that" refers to.

<comment><USER10> The paragraph above that one is enough context, no? He was asked about pulling out of China.

        Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Thursday the software giant
        had no plans to pull out of China. Microsoft is chiefly
        interested in getting Beijing to crack down on
        intellectual property rights, and has no desire to ruffle
        relations, analysts said.

<comment><USER11> The paragraph above is not a quote of Ballmer. There is no actual context provided to say what _Ballmer_ meant by "that," only what the reporter says Ballmer meant. Perhaps that is what the GP meant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Look people, Google is not above anybody else. Google turned over information to the Indian government to throw some guy in jail for making some remark on a website about the government. Google is just as much against free speech and corroborating with governments against individual rights when it comes to making money. [http://binaryday.com/2008/05/18/is-the-arrest-of-rahul- krish...](http://binaryday.com/2008/05/18/is-the-arrest-of-rahul-krishnakumar- vaid-an-attack-on-free-speech/)

</comment><comment><USER13> China has been all out attacking various networks both corporate and government all over the world since at least 2003 so it puzzles me why this is news to anyone. Google knew all about that at the time, but they only publicly lash out now when they're on the the receiving end? Seems rather self serving.

Especially considering Google is not even as popular as the Alibaba Group owned Yahoo in China, let alone the many Chinese search engines.

</comment><comment><USER14> Correct me if I'm reading this wrong, but doesn't this just mean that Yahoo knew about the attacks _before Google told them?_ Google could have been aware of the attacks well before they told Yahoo about it, and there's no indication (given the information in the body of the article) that Yahoo knew _first_ (likewise, the inverse is true).

</comment><comment><USER15> And yet people still think of Google as more evil than Yahoo. Even when Yahoo has sent some bloggers to jail and now that.

<comment><USER16> They do? I am surprised. In what circles?

<comment><USER15> You don't read the news or blogs? There's not a single day without an article questioning Google evilness when it comes to our data. I never see any about Yahoo.

<comment><USER17> Google has reached the backlash stage in the PR cycle, Yahoo has passed into the too-established-to-be-interesting stage.

<comment><USER16> Could be. It feels that Google is the "in" company in more ways than one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For the reading impaired:

 _Analysts say many foreign multinationals in fact may occasionally bend over backwards to appease Beijing, coveting the vast potential market in what will soon be the world's second-largest economy.

Since Google reported the attacks, only Adobe Systems Inc, Juniper Networks Inc and Rackspace Hosting Inc have acknowledged experiencing similar incidents. But the majority of victims have remained silent._

</comment><comment><USER19> Is Yahoo still around?

<comment><USER20> I think they were bought by AltaVista...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Confession time: I also knew of concerted Chinese attacks "before Google" and kept mum. For the past few years, day after day, countless phishing and spam kept arriving in my inbox with .cn URLs but I kept it to myself.</comment>


Google+ Approaching 50 Million Users - <AUTHOR> http://thecompiler.org/index.php/breaking-news/company-news/95-google/150-google-approaching-50-million-users#.Tn7LGe6f-Js.hackernews <comment><USER2> I don't play the numbers game, because they don't matter as much as whether those numbers happen to include my friends.

My friends were looking for somewhere, and it seems that was G+. So my circles are vibrant and interesting, and keep me going back.

A weird thing though... circles are so useful that the site appears to be dead.

My friends all talk to circles. Every conversation and shared thing is limited to a small audience.

So the public view of all their profiles is: <silence>.

I've started to find this non-ideal. I'm interested in my friends for all that they are, and I know when I've been categorised as I initially did it too. You say something about cycling just to the cyclists... but that's an interest of mine, and my friends like my interests.

I've moved to sharing to Extended Circles or Public all the time. It's far too easy on G+ to end up in very small bubbles concentrated about one thing.

<comment><USER3> G+ is still missing some form of tags/hashtags/topics to allow posting what is only interesting for some of your "friends", but is in no way private. I often post to only some circles not because something is private, but because I don't want to "spam" ti to people in other circles that probably wouldn't be interested - but might as well be.

<comment><USER2> I agree.

The use of circles is currently a reaction to the noise on facebook and twitter.

And whilst that is a social reaction (too much noise > too little noise), it needs a technical solution.

I just feel that circles aren't quite it. There's some little thing missing in finding the sweet spot.

The only things that come to mind would be to create topic circles and then place people circles within them.

The circles placed within a topic would be arranged in rings, those closest to the epicentre get fully sharing (with whatever notifications, etc), and those on the periphery would get some lesser shared view (no notifications, not on main stream wall), and any circles not included wouldn't see anything.

But that's probably way too complex to explain to 150 million users.

<comment><USER3> Why not just add a "topic" or tags? This would at least make it easier to better filter the posts, using a concept that many people already know.

<comment><USER4> Check out www.subjot.com (reviewed here: [http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/08/11/subjot-a-twitter- alter...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/08/11/subjot-a-twitter-alternative- that-lets-you-curate-content/)) for an implementation that lets users subscribe to friends for only certain topics. I suspect it only works with public posts, though (but haven't used the service to know for sure).

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The number of users who sign up in the first couple weeks after a google product goes live isn't predictive of the success of the product.

Buzz had 'tens of millions' [1] of users checking it out in the first week after it launched, and wave had well over a million users try it out.

Looking at search traffic isn't quite as good as user traffic, but its still interesting. Here's search traffic for buzz, plus and wave on the same graph: [http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+plus%2C+google+buzz%2C...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+plus%2C+google+buzz%2C+google+wave&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

This is the search traffic graph of a healthy product (google maps): [http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+maps&ctab=0&ge...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+maps&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

[1] [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz- users...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users-and- improvements.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Considering there is a giant "ad" at the top of Google.com, I'm surprised it's such a small number, relative to total number of GOOG users.

<comment><USER7> It was invite only until very recently. And when I was interested in sending out invites it was gmail only, I don't know if that ever changed.

<comment><USER8> Google+ invites have never been restricted to Gmail users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They need to share how much time users are spending on G+. That's the number that matters.

</comment><comment><USER10> Source? That doesnt sound like an unreasonable number, but I'm dubious of articles like this (site I've never been to before, obvious bias, lack of source).

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not so sure if this number means anything. Don't get me wrong: I'd love to see G+ succeed, so that FB has some serious competition. But despite nearly 2-dozen early adopter friends on G+, it feels pretty empty. Initially they used to post updates a couple of times a day, and now it's rare to see more than 1 update per week.

Unless Google does something drastic, I feel G+ is going to die a slow death.

<comment><USER7> Most of the people I know that use it, use it more like twitter, including myself. I follow a lot of people I find interesting, like Wil Wheaton and Paul Irish, they are both really active and post interesting, to me, stuff, which I comment on and reshare and occasionally post stuff I find interesting. Then there is the vast majority of my actual friends and family that just read the content and maybe +1 once in a while. It's basically the 1% rule where 90% of the people lurk, 9% of the people contribute and 1% create content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not really a fair comparison ... Google has millions of users already and it's completely frictionless for them to adopt yet another available service. Facebook and Twitter had to sign up brand new users.

I'm perhaps a perfect example ... I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account at all. But I did sign up for G+ in July and do occasionally use it.

<comment><USER13> And yet, buzz and wave had dismal uptake, whereas G+ appears to be very successful by any metric.

Also, how does "fair" play into anything?

<comment><USER14> I missed the part where they promoted buzz and wave with a giant animated arrow on the google homepage

<comment><USER15> I actually agree that it's not a fair comparison, but they did make Buzz an opt-out component of Gmail. No, it's not an arrow on their front page, but what you seem to be getting at is also not completely correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 50 million very, very quiet users.

</comment><comment><USER14> It will be interesting once we start seeing numbers that matter, like active users or engagement metrics.

</comment><comment><USER17> Personally, I've used G+ the first week.. but it's been about a month(?) that I haven't read/talk on it.

</comment><comment><USER18> G+ is slowly becoming another orkut. it is kind of twitter. it is kind of facebook... it is ... maybe its alright place to get nifty videos, interesting news bits. but facebook is still about your friends. That is all IMO and my gut feeling.

</comment><comment><USER19> I almost joined, by accident. If you are signed in Gmail or adsense and go there all it takes a button to click.

Posting on it and is a different story, I'm sure.

</comment><comment><USER20> its just a copy cat of facebook . i never thought that google simply copy things, i expected a very innovative social networking application from google.

</comment><comment><USER19> I want to join just so I can have Scoble on my circles!! Add him, take a screenshot, print it and then show it to kids on the neighborhood. Now that's a status symbol

;)

</comment><comment><USER21> IMO, Google+ design and functionality is years light behind Twitter and Facebook, for mentioning two examples. In my opinion they should think about the average user needs and not just the geek-blind-view. It could be both simple and _nice_ (now it is just ugly and barely functional).

Edit: Observation: Despite negative voting, my intention was constructive, in order to point the weak points from my point of view. Go figure.</comment>


Firefox Features Google as Default Search Provider in the U.S. - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/firefox-features-google-as-default-search-provider-in-the-u-s-canada-hong-kong-and-taiwan/ <comment><USER2> DuckDuckGo, Start Page, or Qwant might have been a little more in the spirit of Mozilla and privacy. Then again it takes about half a second to change the default search to your own preference.

Google is probably the most approachable for the vast majority of users. It is a sensible move in that regard.

<comment><USER3> Your right on a privacy front from an absolute perspective. But, it's almost certain that Google paid for this change. A stronger Mozilla (financially speaking) is good for privacy and free software.

Also, normal users expect Google. So, having it in the default provides a more familiar experience for them to possibly switch to Firefox.

<comment><USER4> Still, Firefox could automatically switch to e.g. Duckduckgo whenever the user is in incognito mode.

<comment><USER5> I love the idea. Would you mind mind filing a bug on [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/)?

<comment><USER6> One more idea - any chance you guys are making a Firefox Focus for the desktop? It's great on mobile, would love a desktop version too!

<comment><USER7> It's just a content blocker + private browsing. Can get same functionality on desktop with private browsing and some ad blocker

<comment><USER6> Plus tab functionality removed, hence the name "focus".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like the quality of deep search is diminishing; either there is less free content on the web, or search has been optimized for something else; I just get the same results over and over, not matter what combination of search terms I used on a topic.

<comment><USER9> I agree. It's incredibly difficult to find anything that isn't a basic, low- value result when you're looking for advanced, detailed content.

Maybe I'm looking up practices on how to write efficient SQL queries. All of the results I find are just slideshare presentations and basic blog posts on how to add an index to your select statement.

It feels impossible to find depth nowadays, when everything that search engines deem relevant are the big, heavy-SEO websites with the lowest tier of query-relevant information. Sure, the results may be good for people who want just-the-basics about what they're searching, but anything more than that feels hidden away.

<comment><USER10> Hi, I work on Google search. I'd be interested in any specific examples of queries that you think give worse results today than in the past.

<comment><USER11> "Interstate 76 custom maps"

I'm sure it's confusing to your algorithms on many levels. Is it a map of the highway that I want? Oh, there's this game, let's add that too. What about some news about the highway?

I just want some new roads to frag on... I get one result with what I'm looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really just wish they would go back to letting the search bar change on the fly and remain that way until you change it back. With the little icon letting you know which service it is currently set to.

Does anyone know why that functionality was removed? If I'm searching for anything other than my default chances are I'm going to be searching at least 3 different things before getting it right, but then I can't just change the text and press enter.

While I'm ranting, when did google stop paying attention to the actual words you type and starting showing what they think you meant? I mean I know it's been gradual, but at some point over the last few years I've noticed having to use quotes for almost everything, and it still doesn't return exact results. I assume that has something to do with how they normalize the ngrams and how I'm not the target audience anymore, but it's still annoying.

<comment><USER13> I use DDG as default, and have all my other engines set with keywords. Searching wikipedia (mapped to 'wk') for instance is as easy as:

ctrl+l

wk <search_key_word>

<comment><USER14> [https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mozilla missed the opportunity to regain some of their authentic voice with this announcement.

"This is part of our ongoing search strategy, announced in 2014 to evaluate and select the best search experience in each region as opposed to having a single global default." is revisionist. I worked on a competing browser, Flock, in 2005 and Mozilla already had a strong and wonderful commitment to use the (local) best search engine for Firefox in a region. When they switched to "Yahoo!" without additional transparency about the economic factor it made it easier for me to use Chrome without feeling moral regret. With the exception of this blog post / announcement I'm really excited overall to see Mozilla back in the game.

<comment><USER16> There was never any real commitment to the "best" search engine in a region. Mozilla has been paid by Google to be the default search since 2004.

<comment><USER17> I'd say they're using the best for the financial viability of Mozilla. Which in turn is for the best of their users.

<comment><USER16> I don't disagree. But that doesn't change the fact that the parent post's idea that they "choose the best search engine" is completely false. Mozilla has been paid for search settings consistently since 2004.

<comment><USER15> The feedback in the responses leads me to believe my ear may have been too close to the loudspeaker, but here is a quote attributed to Mozilla Marketing leader Asa Dotzler in 2009: "Firefox users have their choice of several built- in and popular search services including Google's number 1 competitor and the second most popular, Yahoo!. Google is the default for most Firefox locales because it's the best search service available for the largest number of Firefox users (and was years before there was any revenue associated with default status)." [https://searchengineland.com/will-bing-finally-be- admitted-i...](https://searchengineland.com/will-bing-finally-be-admitted- into-the-firefox-club-31679)

I also think I remember Firefox's default search engine in Japan regularly being used as an example of doing right by users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if at this point Google _wants_ to keep Mozilla in the game. Their market share is low enough and it keeps antitrust regulators at bay. It looks bad if there are only two major browsers, one of which owned by a company which already got slapped for this very kind of monopolistic behavior.

Sorta like Intel and AMD.

<comment><USER19> With Firefox 57, the UI changed to look almost identical to Chrome. The tabs are now boxy, not round anymore. The hamburger menu changed from the useful big box with big icons to a long menu that looks 99% like Chrome incl the unusual page zoom buttons in the menu. Now we may know why, Google is paying them again, after Yahoo deal is no more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Eh...if the Google search money keeps Mozilla going, why not? It's no worse than having Yahoo as the default search provider previously. I switch my default to DuckDuckGo anyway.

</comment><comment><USER21> So Mozilla backed out of their 5-year contract with Yahoo then [1]. Do they have a new agreement with Google that I'm not seeing anywhere?

[1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice- an...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-and- innovation-on-the-web/)

<comment><USER16> My guess is the other way around: Yahoo backed out of their contract with Mozilla. The biggest difference for either of these companies this year is that Verizon now owns Yahoo, and probably doesn't want to pay for search market share. If the deal's a yearly cost or something similar, the bill's coming up in December.

<comment><USER22> They have to keep paying though

[https://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer- deal-...](https://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer-deal-mozilla- yahoo-payment)

<comment><USER23> We don't know the exact details of the contract. And even if it was written as such, both parties could agree to a change in the contract that could allow either side to get out on certain conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Makes sense I guess. Nobody wants Yahoo search as a default.

<comment><USER25> And, to be fair, most users probably want Google to be their default.

Considering how heavily Mozilla's been recently touting Firefox as the privacy-oriented alternative to Chrome (in Facebook ads, and probably elsewhere), to me it makes Mozilla appear flippant.

<comment><USER26> Well, there's 'flippant' and then there's financial reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> On mobile Firefox makes it really easy to select a different provider.

I now use it on iOS too, even if it's just a shell for iOS's Safari view — the UI is nicer and you can enable tracking protection to be always on.

</comment><comment><USER28> Shortened title is misleading:

Firefox Features Google as Default Search Provider... _" in the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong and Taiwan"_

EDIT title updated (within HN title length constraints, I guess), thanks admins :)

<comment><USER29> It's already the default in Europe from what I've seen.

<comment><USER30> Depends on where and which countries you consider "Europe".

<comment><USER29> When I say Europe I mean "Western Europe minus the islands to the north"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What's with requiring an Add-on to set a search engine URL?

I can't remove the "&t=ffab" query tag from the DuckDuckGo search. Presumably ffab is Firefox Address Bar.

</comment><comment><USER32> default search should be google search and default maps should be google maps. yelp on the contrary forces you to use apple maps on iphone and that kind of sucks.

</comment><comment><USER33> Looks like Google is gaining its foothold back

<comment><USER34> I've been out of reading news about it are they still shuffling cash to Mozilla?

<comment><USER35> I suspect so. Not very impressed that Mozilla failed to mention the money question, when it's obviously going to be a matter of concern for anyone who thinks the Mozillian way.

Could be an interesting tension if so. Mozilla were involved in a recent event promoting awareness of data/privacy concerns. They weren't shy about mentioning Google by name as a big bad.

[https://theglassroom.org/](https://theglassroom.org/)

<comment><USER36> Mozilla has always disclosed financial matters in their financial reports, bringing it up in a release announcement would send a strange message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> You can't even remove all the search engines. I tried.

</comment><comment><USER38> Mozilla's punch line "Built for People, not for profit" stands at odds with this since we know Google monetizes the heck out your search history.

Another interesting thing to note is Apple dropped Bing for Siri and Firefox stayed with Google. Sounds like Microsoft is not even trying.

<comment><USER39> Was their punchline also at odds when they used Yahoo/Bing or was that different?

<comment><USER40> Also keep in mind that Firefox has used Google since 2004 I think.

<comment><USER41> Dude, no. The current deal with Yahoo has been in place for like 2 and a half years, at least.

<comment><USER40> Yes, but that is not the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There will likely be some people errantly suggesting this is due to search quality. It is not. Yahoo previously outbid Google approximately three years ago for that default search offering, and it's likely their arrangement has come to an end. One of Mozilla's strongest sources of funding comes from selling the default search engine spot to the highest bidder.

EDIT: As an interesting note: Yahoo's deal was for five years, not three. I am guessing Verizon decided it didn't want to pay for Mozilla anymore, and cut it off early?

<comment><USER42> Which is a great choice IMO. Open source software needs funding, and I'm always a fan of projects finding ways to be self supporting rather than relying solely on donations.

Changing default search is trivial enough for anyone who cares to, and if they did go with Duck Duck Go or similar as the default, I think you'd likely find many/most users changing the default search to Google anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> just another reason to avoid it. mandatory telemetry, mandatory pulseaudio in linux, pocket, that weird failed video chat thing, and the DRM add-on that literally no one asked for.

<comment><USER44> You have options to decline sending any potentially personal data back, and then telemetry would include only basic, anonymised usage info to help them improve Firefox. Pocket is now part of Mozilla and you can still just remove the button from the toolbar and ignore it completely. I assume that video chat thing was only ever proof-of-concept, at least I don't see it anywhere anymore. As for EME, well, most people want their Netflix/Hulu fix. If Mozilla declined to support EME then they'll quickly become _obsolete_.

<comment><USER45> > telemetry would include only basic, anonymised usage info to help them > improve Firefox.

This is unacceptable. Why can't I turn it off completely?

<comment><USER46> I believe Santosh83 means even if you leave it on, it will be anonymized performance data

<comment><USER45> You can't anonymize data in transit since it requires a sender IP which makes the sent performance data susceptible to interception and analysis by intermediaries.

<comment><USER47> It's boring data, encrypted in transit (HTTPS). About the only thing intermediaries can learn is that someone used Firefox at the time of the request.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Things like this illustrate why it's a bit disingenuous to praise the nonprofit status of Mozilla as some huge distinguishing factor. Not only do the executives pay themselves more than generous salaries (1m for chair, 874k for director, 908k for treasurer) but nonprofit doesn't mean free from commercial concerns. They still need to make money to pay those salaries and support their projects. It seems wiser to judge the ethos of a company based on their actions and decisions instead of their corporate tax status.

[1] - [https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en- US/pdf/2014_Mozilla_Found...](https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en- US/pdf/2014_Mozilla_Foundation_Fed_990_Public_Disclosure.pdf)

<comment><USER49> While it's true that Mozilla pays its people well (necessary, to compete for high end tech talent) and we (I work for Mozilla) are in no way free from commercial concerns, I think you're missing a big piece of why being a nonprofit _is_ a distinguishing factor: Mozilla doesn't have the insane pressure for growth that most startups and all publicly traded companies have to reckon with. Any company that has gone public, wants to go public, or wants to get acquired has a never ending pressure for user and/or revenue growth at all costs. Mozilla doesn't have that pressure for growth. Of course we need to maintain enough market share to stay relevant, and we'd love to have more and more and more users, but ultimately as long as we can make enough money to pay for our operations then we're golden. This gives us a lot more freedom of choice when making decisions about what and how to make money.

<comment><USER50> > This gives us a lot more freedom of choice when making decisions about what > and how to make money.

I'd argue the opposite. Mozilla seem too scared to try anything substantial because they're scared of losing the money they do get (because they aren't actively going after other sources and not trying to grow into new revenue sources). Think of e.g. tracking protection - Apple are the ones actually making moves there, not Mozilla. I wonder why...

<comment><USER51> Mozilla created their own high performance programming language in order to build a faster web engine from scratch (all of which has been largely successful). They developed and shipped a mobile OS well into the reign of Android and iOS. You could argue about the placement of their priorities, but they have definitely thrown their weight behind ambitious projects.

<comment><USER50> Ambitious in a technical sense - yes. But not ambitious in a "protect the users" sense (see e.g. tracking protection/ad blocking), and also not ambitious in a business sense (i.e. try to do something beyond sell users/traffic to the highest bidding search engine).

(Perhaps they could have made money by selling devices with the OS, but that didn't seem to be the aim there, as far as devices being only sold by partners.)

This is very much the stereotypical engineer approach: trying to engineer your way into revenue. Yes you need strong technology to keep users, but there's a lot more to business than the tech stack and quality.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Infinity – Work management platform that never gets cluttered - <AUTHOR> https://startinfinity.com <comment><USER2> Nice tool! I've been using Trello for 2 years now, but I haven't been completely satisfied with it.. however, free plan is awesome, and I buy a cheap power-up from time to time, which lets me stay organized + stay on budget.

However, I'm very intrigued by your tool! Is there a chance you could spoil a pricing plan for Infinity? Who knows, it might be the next big thing for me!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, it's free for everyone until middle of December, when we're planning to implement payment. When we release payment, it will be free for teams with 5 or less members. For teams with more than 5 members cost will be $9 per team member. Also, Enterprise options is on business and product roadmap, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been using this tool for a couple of days now. Got an invite for the beta. It looks really refreshing. Simple to get started and I love the clean look. Still figuring out all the different things I can do in it. I'm bummed out there's no mobile support yet though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to hear that you like it! Mobile apps are on our product roadmap, so native mobile will be ready in Q1 or Q2 2019.</comment></comment>


Why Nice Guys Finish Last at Startups? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/84587/why-nice-guys-finish-last-at-startups/

<comment><USER2> _Speak with power – without being profane. Also, interrupt. [...] Also, make sure you're permitted to complete your sentences, and use vivid emotion- producing language._

I've worked with this type of person. He could have written the book on power dynamics. Unfortunately, his insistence on interrupting and not being interrupted pushed the people around him toward fighting rather than cooperating, even when there were no real disagreements in the room. Yes, it will help you get ahead, but at the same time it will destroy the organization around you.

<comment><USER3> Know when the situation is important to "getting ahead", and when its just work - and use appropriate language for each.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like every business owner should be aware of this sort of thing... aware so that he or she can recognize and fire the employees who play these destructive games to get ahead.

As a business owner, though, I think the rules for playing power games are quite different; First, I care about how well the company does more than how "powerful" you think I am. I mean, if I don't let you finish what you are trying to say, why the hell am I still employing you?

besides, you know I can fire you. I have the metaphorical 'big stick' in the situation; there is no reason to lord my status over you.

<comment><USER5> The guys who do the interrupting power dynamic thing don't do it to their bosses - only their subordinates and competitors. This, too, is part of the "skill set" they bring. The attitude of their manager is extremely important in this - some people actually admire the people doing the bullying and think it shows potential for advancement. I'm not sure why, but it explains a lot...

<comment><USER4> right; my point was that if you have significant ownership, becoming a bully likely hurts you (because it hurts the company) more than it helps you (because who is going to promote you? you own the place.) My point is that the traditional rules for office politics are designed for an environment where the actual owners are absent, and what you have left are the middle managers arguing over control of other people's money. The equation works out quite a bit differently in a startup where the boss usually owns a pretty significant chunk of the company.

It's the "at startups" bit of the title (which doesn't seem to be supported by the rest of the article) that I object to.</comment></comment></comment>


This company is killing the need of having a QA dept - <AUTHOR> http://www.covalentai.com <comment><USER2> Looks like they hosted on Amazon S3 but didn't set up an alias record for www [http://covalentai.com](http://covalentai.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> You have a bug in your post. The URL has a bad domain name. Seems like QA is still needed :)</comment>


A JIT compiled Ruby implementation in RPython - <AUTHOR> http://topaz.readthedocs.org/en/latest/blog/announcing-topaz/

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is amazing. That PyPy was more than a fast Python implementation (closer to "a toolkit for building fast implementations of, well, pretty much anything") wasn't a big secret, but to see someone pick it up and go with it is fantastic :)

For people attending PyCon, Alex Gaynor of the PyPy team will be doing a presentation on how to write interpreters that will use PyPy tools, that ends with ways of adding a JIT, so if you're interested be sure to come take a look :) (for people who don't have tickets yet: I'm sorry, we're sold out).</comment>


MP3 sound quality: Good enough - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2009/09/dithering-jonny-greenwood.html

<comment><USER2> This guy takes the "anti-audiophile" sentiment a bit too far. If you know what a FLAC is, you must also have more money than sense and want oxygen-free copper cables?

FLAC is a good means of conveying audio losslessly. Monster Cables are snake oil. These things are not the same.

(And I'm on the older cusp of the "MP3 generation," so this isn't somehow an age thing.)

<comment><USER3> Hmmm... Well I agree with you about him taking it to far. I know monster cables are bull, but true audiophiles ($25000 and up per system) will use non- monster oxygen-free cables, and they swear by them. I will give it to them, some of those systems really sound great. I don't know if it's due to the lack of oxygen in the lines though.

<comment><USER4> I promise you, it's not. There's a lot of articles floating around recently about the placebo effect in medicine. I'll be kind to these people, and let them off with the excuse that placebo effect, which is still not understood, is the reason their $500 cables make them think their audio sounds better.

Audio is something we understand pretty well. We can measure it's delay and phase and amplitude and distortion. We can measure these things, and we can see when they change, and we can see when they don't change. We can see these changes to levels that the human ear can't detect, but even if you believe that an audiophile can detect things that others can't, we can see these changes on our instruments.

I'm not certain how far to beat this horse. It's a little like arguing that gold doesn't fall faster than lead, even though gold is heavier. At the end of the day, you either believe in measurable science, or you don't. As somebody who has spent countless hours in front of an audio analyzer, tracking down actual audio effects all the way down into the noise floor of the system, I am confident on this issue.

Still, the guys selling those cables are richer than I am, so who's the idiot? Certainly not the salesmen.

<comment><USER2> Further robotrout's point: a friend of mine did some research on actual sound quality for generic versus high-price cables.

He measured the noise floor with Monster cables at about -160dB, whereas cheap crappy cables were about -125dB. However, he also found that basically all of the difference is explained by higher quality connectors on the Monster cables compared to his ultra cheap bargain basement ones; when he replaced the cheap connectors with some modestly priced RCA connectors that weren't utter shit (but were not Monster cable made), the two cables were indistinguishable.

For the record, even -125dB is below the noise floor of arguably every person on earth.

So really, the most important thing for cables is to always use good connectors. You cannot hear the difference between "super duper copper" and "layman's copper."

Another popular bit of audiophile snake oil is "ribbon cables." These use wide, flat conductors instead of round ones because---they claim---the round conductors have higher impedance because of the skin effect (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect> ). Of course, this is absolute bullshit, because skin depth at audio frequencies is more than the diameter of the round conductor. What's more, since ribbon cables aren't coaxial, they're actually more susceptible to EMI.

...and people still spend hundreds or even thousands _on_the_cable_!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem isn't that $format doesn't sound good, the problem is that when you convert $format to $otherformat for playback on $system, you lose far more quality than if you converted from the original audio file.

<comment><USER6> ACK. Additionally, FLAC is perfect for future-proof archiving. MP3 is already declining (thanks to Apple) and while you will probably still be able to play MP3 files in twenty years, it will hopefully not be the format of choice. Other formats are superior to MP3 even today -- not only in sound quality, but in other areas like gapless playback and metadata capabilities as well.

But hey, Jonny is still one of my heroes. :)

<comment><USER7> "MP3 is already declining (thanks to Apple) "

How do you know that? And what format is supposed to be replacing mp3? It's the only audio format I run into on the Web (but then I don't use Apple products to play music).

<comment><USER6> I don't use Apple products either but I know that they sell tracks AAC encoded. And that's exactly why I see MP3 declining: before iTunes, there was no serious competitor for it.[1] But now the biggest online retailer of music uses an alternative. MP3's "market share" may only have gone down by a few percent. But thanks to iTunes, AAC songs can now be played almost anywhere. Since most people couldn't care less about the format of theit digital music collection, as long as they can play it, MP3 has lost a lot of its relevance. It will probably survive as a household term for digital music, irrespective of the actual encoder, though.

[1] Yes, I do know Ogg Vorbis. It is even my lossy format of choice. But it's never been a threat to MP3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "MP3" can mean a lot of things (to some people it just means "digital music"). Quality depends on the bitrate, on CBR vs VBR, on the encoder used, on the playback device, etc.

Personally, I ripped most of my CDs in 256kbs VBR AAC (no DRM), and that's fine for me. But I wouldn't go back to 128kbps MP3s (especially if encoded with something else than LAME).

I'd love to use more OGG Vorbis, but iTunes just plays better with AAC (even if you install the quicktime codec, you can't have the artwork inside the files).

<comment><USER9> > "MP3" can mean a lot of things (to some people it just means "digital > music"). Quality depends on the bitrate, on CBR vs VBR, on the encoder used, > on the playback device, etc.

Yeah but every time you need to transcode your music to the next format of the day, you're going to lose a bit of quality. And the losses multiply too, they don't just add from one lossy format to one another.

If you store your music in a lossless format, you just have to come back to your lossless copy to create each lossily-generated copy, and you'll only ever have the losses of this transcoding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> He started this series by saying that he thinks vinyl is "the best available method for reproducing recorded music."

I believe that anyone who thinks this has never bothered to learn how audio reproduction works in theory or in practice.

(I say this as someone who loves vinyl for many reasons... just not for its reproduction.)

</comment><comment><USER11> Well, if CD sound quality is good enough..

</comment><comment><USER12> I was just talking to friends about this the other day. MP3s are convenient, but the fidelity isn't the same as a CD (or the nuisances of a record). Are we lowering our standards as a society, because we don't have time for Xbox, TV, Music, and Family. For the most part music is timeless. Will we get to the point where MP3s will be the only distribution medium and we lose the timelessness of Music? Perhaps we already have.

<comment><USER13> "the fidelity isn't the same as a CD"

At what bitrate? I don't think I can tell the difference by 256...

<comment><USER14> What are you listening on? I expect that most people could tell the difference if they listened on a reasonable quality separate CD player, amp and speakers and compared that with an MP3 player plugged into the same amp and speakers. Unfortunately I don't have an experiment I can cite but having tried it myself, I can say the difference is substantial.

<comment><USER15> You're probably experiencing the placebo effect.

If you care there's software that will let you double-blind test yourself to see what bitrate is transparent for you.

LAME above 165 should be transparent (i.e. sound the same as the source) for most people even with good equipment.

<comment><USER16> notice what he said:

"quality separate CD player, amp and speakers and compared that with an MP3 player plugged into the same amp and speakers"

"MP3 player"

I'd assume that it means iPod-style device, which probably doesn't have as high quality output as "quality separate CD player". Yes, its comparing apples to oranges, but its different from placebo

<comment><USER14> Good point. I haven't listened to high bitrate MP3s through something like an iPod but with a high-end outboard DAC. With a setup like that I believe it could become hard/impossible to tell the difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> MP3 causes a hearing disorder called Tinnitus. There's a research paper about it here: [http://weltenschule.de/Logologie/info/MP3-Gefahr/MP3-risk.ht...](http://weltenschule.de/Logologie/info/MP3-Gefahr/MP3-risk.html)

I don't mean MP3 is totally bad but, I believe it might affect a sensitive person when the bitrate is below 160kbps and badly encoded.

</comment><comment><USER16> If only the problem would be in the transfer medium and not in the MAX GAIN LOUDNESS IS HEAVEN -style mastering.</comment>


What are good legal crash courses for geeks? - <AUTHOR>

If I wanted to learn basic principles of law and contracts, what would you recommend reading? <comment><USER3> This really depends on why you're asking and what you want to use it for.

If you want to roll up your sleeves and learn a new discipline, but just as a hobby, you might get the best information density from a commercial outline, like Emanuel or Gilbert's.

[http://www.amazon.com/Contracts-Emanuel-Law-Outline- Steven/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Contracts-Emanuel-Law-Outline- Steven/dp/0735544670)

[http://www.amazon.com/Gilbert-Law-Summaries- Contracts-14th/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Gilbert-Law-Summaries- Contracts-14th/dp/0159007763)

Probably more info than you could ever want, but those usually contain abbreviated outlines in the beginning, and more detailed outlines in the back, so you can expand to the level detail desired. It could even serve as a general reference aid (with the caveat that textbook law is rarely good law, it's usually superseded by local regulations or more recent precedents - <USER2> might just get you in the ballpark).

You'd get a deeper understanding of some of the key debates in the development of these areas of the law by reading the case law referenced along the way.

There's some benefit from seeing how the law handles contracts differently from torts or criminal law, and trying to figure out why, so you could turn to those subjects once you've mastered contracts. That's essentially the law school approach.

If you just want to make yourself a more well rounded citizen or think deep and interesting thoughts about social order, then probably pick a major case in Supreme Court law every week or so to read through and ponder. Read the dissents as well, the dissents are really crucial to making it clear why these were nontrivial questions.

Here are 50 highly cited SCotUS cases (from a few years back, but not a terrible list to start with): [http://heinonline.blogspot.com/2009/01/most- cited-us-supreme...](http://heinonline.blogspot.com/2009/01/most-cited-us- supreme-court-cases-in.html)

You could listen to the oral arguments for many of these over at the Oyez Project: [http://www.oyez.org/](http://www.oyez.org/) But that's really of secondary interest to the actual opinions.

If you just want to be more savvy in commercial transactions and court cases, you probably need a tour through the Uniform Commercial Code, and to learn some Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Those are just seemingly endless lists of abstract rules though, not sure there's an easy way to make those more accessible. That's what keeps attorneys employed, I'd recommend avoiding unless you're considering law school.</comment>


Ask HN: Any free resource(s) for Maths terminologies and notations? - <AUTHOR> Are there any free resources that explain in plain English all Maths terminologies, notations and symbols that  kids and teenagers will be able to understand? <comment><USER2> Notations, symbols, terminologies and words are cheap in math. Most math text/books actually have a page or two explaining what each symbol stands for in THAT particular book. What counts in math are IDEAS. That said, a good entry point into the world of mathematics is Book of Proof by Richard Hammack [0]. It's free.

[https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/](https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the link!</comment></comment>


Democracy Index 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=DemocracyIndex2016 <comment><USER2> For their 2018 report, Freedom House gave the U.S. three points less:

[https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/united- st...](https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/united-states)

Even that bastion of conservatism admits there was fishiness in the previous elections.

</comment><comment><USER3> > ... because of a further erosion of trust in government and elected > officials there.

Is that a sign that the US is becoming less Democratic or a sign that Americans are becoming wiser?

Are politicians in higher ranked countries more trustworthy, or are their misdeeds less well known?

<comment><USER4> _Being too cynical and pleasantly surprised is not more sophisticated than being too idealistic and disappointed._

[https://twitter.com/jonlovett/status/889931964144246784?lang...](https://twitter.com/jonlovett/status/889931964144246784?lang=en)

<comment><USER3> As a cynic I'm rarely pleasantly surprised, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note that this predates the current presidency.

<comment><USER6> Am I the only one surprised they ever made it to full democracy?

First-past-the-post voting and the dysfunctional 2 party states it engenders would be enough for me to mark it down, never mind the new Jim crow, gerrymandering, funding model, popular vote not counting etc.

<comment><USER7> Are you kidding? Your preferred candidate doesn't win and suddenly the system is rigged?

<comment><USER6> It's the "suddenly" part that I'm taking issue with. The problems with American democracy are well documented and yes "rigged" is term that objectively applies to it over many decades in many different ways.

Electoral reform is underrated, I think people can't quite imagine how different things would be under voting regimes where every voter can help you, even if you're their 2nd, 3rd or 4th choice. This means that people work on projects with broad appeal, and have less incentive to demonise the people that will never vote for them. Just the fact that you can assume I'm on "the other team" from my comment is part of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is the definition of a "Flawed Democracy" versus "Full Democracy" (as defined by The Economist)? I can't view the paper because I don't have an account.

<comment><USER9> "Flawed democracies are nations where elections are fair and free and basic civil liberties are honored but may have issues (e.g. media freedom infringement). Nonetheless, these nations have significant faults in other democratic aspects, including underdeveloped political culture, low levels of participation in politics, and issues in the functioning of governance."

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think we are (in 2018) rubbing up against the link limitations of our current democratic systems, or maybe republic systems.

Our current democracies generally meet the 19th century definitions of liberalism, in that the people select the government. But I think that in the modern mind, democratic systems (eg the elected people) are supposed to conduct the pure will of the people. We don't really like the idea of representative democracy, where representatives have minds (and interests) of their own. It doesn't help that democratic political systems are very mature, with well established and understood political dynamics (parties, etc.) driving most things.

Imo, what people have in mind as a genuinely democratic system is more like direct democracy. Frighteningly, we still have strong modernist mentalities when it comes to politics. Most people argue from abstract justice, and assume efficacy (if they consider it at all) to be a byproduct of justice. IE if the system directly conducted the will of the people, stuff would also work better.

Realistically, we have the technology now for direct democracy but almost no experience with it. I suspect we'll see attempts made in the next couple of decades.

Anyway... I wonder if the Economist is influenced by the same sentiments, and have altered their view of what democracy is (or should be, idealistically).

</comment><comment><USER11> TL;DR: democracy is "full" when elections are won by politicians The Economist supports, and "flawed" otherwise.

<comment><USER12> Prove it

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Gotta love that polite British understatement of things...

[http://digg.com/2018/west-virginia-woman-ejected- donors](http://digg.com/2018/west-virginia-woman-ejected-donors)

<comment><USER7> Jesus, that woman is one of the reasons why I've become so cynical about politics. It's just about scoring points now.

What that article should say is"woman chooses to be disruptive at public hearing, gets kicked out."

If I decide to a public hearing and play rap music really loud as a protest and I get kicked out, it doesn't mean the system is broken. It actually means it works.

<comment><USER13> So publicly enumerating all of the little venalities surrounding a bill is the same as playing "rap music really loud as a protest"?

edit: original post title was _The US has been downgraded from a "full democracy" to a "flawed democracy"_

<comment><USER7> Going into a meeting to be disruptive is not "participating in democracy". She went there to get arrested. She succeeded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you don't like "Register or log in to download this free report", it's available in Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Inde...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Index_by_country_\(2016\))

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not especially looking forward to sitting through recaps of this article with the Economist readers I know.

Random observation, one nice thing about the Economist is that its readers are super handy about identifying themselves.

<comment><USER16> I used to read every issue of the economist. I stopped when I realized I already knew what they were going to say for the rest of the article after reading the first paragraph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ain't "full democracy" means "direct democracy"? No 4 year group dictatorship.

</comment><comment><USER18> Typical Economist analysis. Quite accurate and perceptive -- at predicting and evaluating things which have already happened.

Also, seems to be paywalled.

<comment><USER9> Why does this list have to be predictive to be useful?

Isn't it quite reasonable that it's based on past performance rather than being a guess at what might happen in the future?

<comment><USER18> It's like Moody's. More political than educational. Downgrading the US may be fair, but the main purpose it serves is driving clicks. More to the point, the fact they downgraded the US shouldn't tell the average HN reader anything they don't already know. Contrast to say, S&P.

Edit: By the way, look at the way the top of the "Flawed Democracies" cluster under 8.00! I can totally believe some tweaking went on here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> this is almost as bad as a strongly worded letter from the UN.

<comment><USER20> this is almost as bad as a strongly worded internet comment.</comment></comment>


A cache miss is not a cache miss - <AUTHOR> http://larshagencpp.github.io/blog/2016/05/01/a-cache-miss-is-not-a-cache-miss <comment><USER2> That's a nice demonstration. I would even go a bit further with the conclusion/lesson: Cache misses are not evil.

When data isn't in a register and isn't in the L1 cache, it takes a lot of time to fetch it from other caches or about 200 clock cycles if it comes all the way from main memory. We measure that event as a cache miss. But modern x86 processors will go to great lengths to execute the rest of the program while waiting for the data to arrive. A cache miss only really slows the program down if there aren't enough nearby instructions that can be executed while waiting for the missing value to arrive.

You could likely write a program that triggers a cache miss every 30 clock cycles but runs at the same speed as a program without cache misses. In a different program, a cache miss every 30 clock cycles can mean a slowdown by two orders of magnitude. Cache misses are only a useful metric to give us an idea where to look, not to show actual problems.

<comment><USER3> There is only so much work to go around, before cache misses turn into waiting games, even with branch prediction and micro-code piping.

What is your suggested alternative metric?

<comment><USER4> Worth noting that modern processors aren't just pipelined; each core is composed of multiple pipelined units operating in parallel. Using the Tomasulo algorithm and derivatives, modern processors can execute a ton of instructions before instructions that appear before them are able to complete. The biggest issue is a branch that depends on a slow operation, which forces you to throw out tons of work if you mispredict.

<comment><USER5> Could you define slow operations? I am trying to better imagine a CPU having to throw out work where it is basically trying to get from a cache-miss (failure) to cache-miss (failure) as fast as it can.

<comment><USER6> I think what wyager meant is that on a mispredicted branch you have a CPU pipeline already filled with data and partial results (scheduled loads, r/w register conflicts, etc.) Now that we're at close to 30 stages per instruction, flushing all those partial results because your `if` went in a different branch than usual can get costly. In practice, after a branch misprediction you'll have to wait at least [pipeline_stages] cycles until you see the next instruction run. But if the scheduled instruction was something complex that comes from SSE / AES-NI / etc., you may have to wait even longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good article. A few years ago I wrote a toy program which demonstrates cost of cache misses (or the power of hardware prefetchers). [https://github.com/WojciechMula/toys/tree/master/cache_test](https://github.com/WojciechMula/toys/tree/master/cache_test)

<comment><USER8> > toy program which demonstrates cost of cache misses

never realized 'or' is a keyword... :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It reminds me of this article, where adding prefetching to attempt to tell the CPU where to go next for a liked-list operation actually had a slightly detrimental effect on performance: [https://lwn.net/Articles/444336/](https://lwn.net/Articles/444336/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Cache impact of linked lists can be mitigated via cdr coding, originally developed to save RAM: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDR_coding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDR_coding)

</comment><comment><USER11> Very cool. Herb Sutter gave a talk [1] a couple years ago in which he advocated being mindful of the CPU prefetcher when dealing with large vectors, esp. vectors of pointers. Essentially as long as memory is being accessed in a predictable manner the pre-fetcher can keep the processor fed.

An aside, because instructions are accessed sequentially (branches aside), I would intuit that data misses are much more common than instruction misses. If this is incorrect I'd be interested in an explanation or further reading.

[1] [https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-661](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-661)

</comment><comment><USER12> If you want to measure cache miss effects, you really should rewrite this code in C, so you know exactly what gets allocated in memory with what layout.

Without more details on data layout, you could be seeing the side-effect of aggressive pointer prefetching, which may only be possible with one layout but not another. Or there could be a fixed stride for some of the data allowing prefetchers to kick in. It's hard to tell and deserves some more experiments to isolate what is going on.

<comment><USER13> The only type used in the demos is vector<pair<int,int>>. Vectors are guaranteed to be contiguous in memory. I'm pretty sure pairs are too, but that's easy to test:

        #include "stdio.h"
        #include <utility>
        printf("%zu\n", sizeof(std::pair<int, int>));

        8

So it's the obvious layout you would see in C with an array of struct { int x; int y }.

The cling interpreter is good for this kind of thing.

<comment><USER14> 20.2.2 Pairs ¶ 1 (ISO/IEC 14882:2003):

      The library provides a template for heterogeneous pairs of values. The library also provides a matching
      function template to simplify their construction.

          template <class T1, class T2>
          struct pair {
            typedef T1 first_type;
            typedef T2 second_type;

            T1 first;
            T2 second;
            pair();
            pair(const T1& x, const T2& y);
            template<class U, class V> pair(const pair<U, V> &p);
          };

          pair();

tl;dr: It looks like the 03 standard _requires_ it to be equivalent to the plant C version in terms of layout, although that could involve padding between first and second if e.g. T1 = short and T2 = int, just like in the equivalent C code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the comparison really fair? On a 64-bit system, the `std::unique_ptr<int>` takes 8 bytes, while a linked list node takes at least 24 bytes (as it must have a previous and next pointer). The larger sizes means less number of values can be in the cache at any time and may be the real reason for the slowdown.

<comment><USER16> This is the reason that the problem was simplified to using vector<pair<int,int>> for all the experiments, so no difference in data size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sets a good example to MEASURE things rather than just relying on "old wives' tales" of programming that everyone believes because everyone believes them. So many times, I've asked someone why they used some weird algorithm, why they wrote their own linked list, or why they unrolled that loop, and it's always "But it's faster!" Well, did you measure it to actually see if it's faster?

One nit: Please, please, stop perpetuating the use of the non-word "performant." I cringe every time I hear it (now even in person at work!) Using it just makes you sound dumb, and clearly the author is not dumb.

<comment><USER18> Don't read Shakespeare. He made up gobs of useful words.

<comment><USER19> Or committed a lot of the vernacular to print, when that was something that wasn't done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think this is the reasoning behind preferring SOA vs AOS.

<comment><USER9> How are Service-Oriented Architectures and... Architecture-Oriented Services(?) relevant to cache misses? There's more locality in the former, because each service is more specific?

<comment><USER21> Structure of arrays vs. array of structures. I.e. Having one struct that contains several arrays as its members, vs. having one array that contains several structs as its elements. The former keeps like data together, so when you need to, for example, iterate over the position vectors of a bunch of objects in a 3D graphics program, all the position vectors for all the objects are tightly packed in the same array, increasing cache efficiency.

<comment><USER9> I've always called those "parallel arrays" \--- and they were around long before Service Oriented Architectures: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_array](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_array)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The real trouble is the inability of chips to identify what haskell could completely avoid, doing the same algorithm for the same input repeatedly. Hashing over input skip and save output, that would be a optimization. Also Tools that give Programmers a DataOrientated-VisualFeedback of the OO- Cluttercosts they impart on there work.

A flag that guarantees side effect freedom to a set of operations and suboperations, for the processor that would be great.

<comment><USER18> Hashing is expensive.

<comment><USER22> Not as expensive as a cache miss.</comment></comment></comment>


PayPal Ripe For A Fall; Here's How To Topple Them - <AUTHOR>

PayPal is, and long has been, the 800-pound gorilla of sending money online.  This is actually surprising when you consider that there is plenty of competition and PayPal's customer management is quite poor.
In the last 36 months, the BBB (Better Business Bureau) has received 7236 complaints related to PayPal (http://sanjose.bbb.org/Business-Report/PayPal-Inc-210387).  More than half of these (3822 complaints), PayPal resolved by agreeing to live up to their contact.  Approximately 15% (1168) are listed on the BBB site as "Unassigned", so the resolution is unclear.  Keeping in mind that the vast majority of Americans who feel wronged by a company do not make a complaint to the BBB and it is very unlikely that anyone outside the USA would do so, this is a bad showing indeed.
The customers in question would probably say that that first 50% had a positive outcome--after all, they got what they wanted--but these numbers actually show a remarkably poor track record, as a company should not need to be prodded in order to live up to its own TOS.
There is plenty of competition--Google Checkout, Obopay, etc.  The main stumbling block seems to be that both sender and recipient must be signed up for whatever service is going to exchange the money.
Better would be a company where only the sender needs to be signed up.  The recipient would be specified via a mobile phone number and the money would be sent as a credit on their phone bill.
Best would be if neither party needed to be signed up, and the whole deal could be dealt with via mobile--I SMS the service in question, they bill my carrier (who passes the charge back to me) and send the money to the recipient's carrier (who credits it to their account).
Hopefully, someone will take that and run with it, because I'm sick of dealing with PayPal. <comment><USER2> IMO, if Google fails at it so spectacularly (with Google Checkout - a true blight on Google), then this is a hard effing business. If you read "Founders at Work", it has a great story/interview with one of the founders of PayPal, Max Levchin. He talks about why PayPal succeeded where others failed. The main gist of it was that PayPal was able to come up with better fraud detection algos and, by doing so, were able to "save" tens of millions each month that their competitors were losing to fraud.

</comment><comment><USER3> Re: mobile payments, I'm assuming you've heard of companies like Zong, Paymo and Boku. It's a much better userxp than Paypal and much more accessible payment method for the under-21 crowd.</comment>


The Internet Explorer IQ Hoax and the State of Tech Blogging - <AUTHOR> http://siliconfilter.com/the-internet-explorer-iq-hoax-and-the-state-of-tech-blogging

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of the 40% Android phones are returned story, or the one from yesterday with the Android Trojan, even though it was only made in a lab, yet they made it sound as if it already was a major issue.

Tech bloggers today are in such a hurry to defend "their side" that they will believe any rumor and will be quick to write a story on it to propagate the rumor further, as if it were fact.</comment>


Breakthrough Material Is a Better Way to Turn CO2 into Clean-Burning Fuel - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a18861/breakthrough-material-is-a-better-way-to-turn-co2-into-fuel/ <comment><USER2> Note this is just a way to convert CO2 into liquid fuel. Its not perpetual motion - it takes about as much energy to create this clean-burning(?!) fuel as it produces. But if clean electricity is used, then the net cycle is CO2 neutral.

<comment><USER3> Unless you capture more than you burn and sequester the rest. If its even possible to sequester an amount that would matter that is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What happens to the cobalt when you burn this fuel? Is the waste of burning purely C02? Or can you capture and re-use the cobalt?</comment>


When It Comes to Coding, Age Isn't a Number - <AUTHOR> https://shecancode.io/blog/when-it-comes-to-coding-age-isnt-a-number <comment><USER2> Seen a lot of age discrimination in tech... There are not enough solutions in the UK to provide digital skills to older people and we are seeing a lot of recruiters steer clear of older technologists in favour of younger techies (possibly due to the price tag?).</comment>