China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/china-is-said-to-order-carriers-to-bar-personal-vpns-by-february <comment><USER2> Previously, there was an implicit understanding that the Great Firewall was in place to prevent unauthorised access to the Internet by the masses. This is to prevent them from being influenced by foreign media, prevent too much information leakage of citizen info (e.g. via facebook), and to give Chinese tech companies a monopoly in China.

If, however, you had the will and ability to use VPN software, the government usually turned a blind eye. Afterall, it was only a minority of people and they usually had a genuine need. In fact, this is what made staying in China tolerable. If this block does truly come into effect, they are essentially closing the door to the outside world.

China was a country of reasonable compromises before, but with Xi Jinping's nationalism, they are starting to think "why should we compromise at all?"

<comment><USER3> That was never the official or even the implicit position. There has always been a war with VPNs, want VPNs work and don't can change monthly, and it's been like that for the last 10 years. Xi's nationalism is nothing new here, they just think that the tech is good enough to cut off VPNS for good now.

China has been trying to close their internet since after the Olympics. It isn't surprising that they would eventually succeed at it.

<comment><USER4> Since well before the Olympics actually. I was in China when 9/11 happened and for a brief period of time they opened access to a large number of previously blocked foreign news sites so that people could read what was happening.

<comment><USER5> why would people be checking a news site that was previously blocked? do you go everyday "oh, let me try cnn.com... oh, still blocked. let's try tomorrow?"

<comment><USER4> Well, first of all, it's not every day that a news event on the scale of 9/11 happens.

As for how I discovered they were unblocked, I got a phone call from my Mum early in the morning after the attack (the attack happened during the Chinese night time) and went in to the office (which had the only available internet access), and one of my colleagues told me that the bbc and nytimes were no longer blocked.

Not sure how he found out they were unblocked, but he'd been there most of the night.

Then once you know one is unblocked you try them all :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> China is one black swan event away from an economic collapse and possible Arab spring. The authoritarian Chinese government is starting to have some sense of fear now. Between the 300%+ gdp/debt ratio, second real estate bubble bursting in shanghai/tier1 cities, huge spike in shadow lending, stalled stock market, complete frozen capital control, Trump's 100 day ultimatum to China regarding trade deficit, demographics crisis, NK situation, south asia island situation, protectionisms against China in europe/US/Japan, Foreign Direct Investments leaving China, etc.

<comment><USER7> _The preconditions of revolution exist in the UK, and most western countries. The number of active pre-conditions is quite stunning, from elite isolation to concentrated wealth to inadequate socialisation and education, to concentrated land holdings to loss of authority to repression of new technologies especially in relation to energy, to the atrophy of the public sector and spread of corruption, to media dishonesty, to mass unemployment of young men and on and on and on. [...] Preconditions are not the same as precipitants. We are waiting for our Tunisian fruit seller. The public will endure great repression, especially when most media outlets and schools are actively aiding the repressive meme of 'you are helpless, this is the order of things.' When we have a scandal so powerful that it cannot be ignored by the average Briton or American, we will have a revolution that overturns the corrupt political systems in both countries, and perhaps puts many banks out of business. Vaclav Havel calls this 'The Power of the Powerless.' One spark, one massive fire._ \- Robert David Steele, ex-Marine, ex-CIA, Open Source Intelligence Expert in _The Guardian_ , 2014-06-19 ... from my fortune DB @ [https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

<comment><USER8> Robert David Steele has interesting things to say about OSINT, but one must take him with an entire cow lick of salt. After getting interested in his ideas and watching several interviews with him, I was very disappointed. His personal narrative is exaggerated; he advocates conspiracy theories that are popular but ridiculous; he shows a certain arrogance. He looks & quacks like an aggressive self promoter without much substance to offer.

This man has claimed to be the father of OSINT one day, and said that Pizzagate was spot-on the next. No one with a clue about how to conduct an investigation should have swallowed that.

That is all to say, I believe we are in very troubled times, but I don't believe we are on the verge of revolution.

<comment><USER7> About the same as my views, but still a fair and handy antidote quote to "China is on the brink of revolution!" as per OP!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From my experience in China, it seems that the vast majority of Chinese citizens have no idea what a VPN is and or why they would use it. Friends of mine that are Chinese citizens that study abroad in the US make extensive use of VPNs to circumvent the GFW.

Every technology company that I've come across in China has invested a great deal of effort into establishing stable VPN connections. I have seen several "VPN microservices" that act to tunnel all foreign-bound traffic out of the country. In the vacuum of mature, western technologies many Chinese copycats have popped up. I have been hoping that we would start to see more and more Chinese technology companies exporting their technology [1]. With these new legislative actions, it seems like a step in the wrong direction.

I'm struggling to come to terms with the restrictive policies that the Chinese government continually struggles to hoist over their citizens. During the midst of one of the most dramatic periods of economic development in history, the Chinese government is moving to artificial isolate themselves from the developing global economy?

[1] Strikingly: [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/striking- ly#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/striking-ly#/entity)

<comment> dis-sys Like it or not, the GFW helped to created the "most dramatic periods of economic development" in Chinese history.

Back in 2010, when Google chose to exit China, many argued the exact same that China is isolating itself from the outside. Such feeling is understandable from a western point of view, I mean for anyone from a western background there is simply no Internet if google/twitter/fb etc. are all unavailable. However, a bold however, 7 years after Google's exit from China, it has been proved again and again that the biggest motivation of GFW is the protectionism aiming to help domestic Internet companies - and that actually paid off pretty well.

You don't need Google/fb/twitter etc to have booming Internet/high tech economy. Look at China's social media, online payment, e-commerce, online gaming, AI, shared economy etc, did China miss out. Let me give you a bloody simple number: I didn't use any cash or bank card/credit card in the last 45 days, everything, I mean 100% everything, was paid by mobile.

This is not about some cheap nationalism - it is _all_ about how many good paying jobs can be made available in China for Chinese. It is the exact same as the Making America Great Again crap. Blocking google/fb/twitter was the first essential step to achieve that.

<comment><USER10> Where are you in China? I just spent a week in a relatively small city in Shandong and there were so many places that were cash only. Couldn't even use card, let alone mobile.

<comment><USER11> I just spent the last 6 weeks in Beijing and Shanghai (currently in Shanghai) and I have run into several places that don't even accept cash anymore, and only accept WeChat Pay or Alipay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> EZ-E With China, there is a big difference between what is said, what is law and what is actually enforced.

What's likely to happen is that there will be a crack down, some satisfying numbers will be shown to officials, and then everything will become back to normal soon after.

There has been this kind of talk about cracking down on VPN before, and it's still available, so wait and see

<comment><USER12> I have a hunch that these kind of news had been circulated before, officials threw a few sacrificial lambs in to reach the quota, then the headlines fade slowly into background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The same state-owned Chinese carriers will sell you products in Hong Kong that when used in mainland China let you circumvent the great firewall. [https://www.larrysalibra.com/hop-over-the-great-firewall- wit...](https://www.larrysalibra.com/hop-over-the-great-firewall-with- government-help/)

The regular crackdowns on VPNs mean that many who live in the region long since stopped using them and switched to a mobile plan or prepaid sim from China Mobile Hong Kong or Hong Kong Unicom that provides a Hong Kong IP address and unfiltered internet while roaming in the mainland.

<comment><USER5> but the regular Chinese cant easily take the train to Hong Kong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The way things are going I'm expecting to see the same initiative in the UK or Germany sooner than you think.

That will stop them evil terrorists.

<comment><USER15> A strange thing to downvote, considering that the UK government has basically promised exactly this sort of measure.

<comment><USER16> Yep. Banning the use of strong encryption (introducing penalties for it,) is the logical conclusion of what Theresa May has said she wants to do.

<comment><USER15> Yes, it absolutely is. Outlawing private communications between citizens (or subjects, in the UK's case) is not the first step down this particular slippery slope, it's well past the halfway point.

I recommend watching a movie called _The Lives of Others_ , to those who don't understand or agree. It should be available on either Netflix or Amazon, or if all else fails, the Pirate Bay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Currently, https tunnels with replay attack protection hold strong.

UDP VPNs do fail at random right now, I guess GFW people arrived at the point when they can't do anything about obfuscated and replay attack protected endpoints other than blocking all UDP traffic at random

</comment><comment><USER18> not being a network guru how easy is this? I have my VPN set to run over port 443 but I assume it would be easy to see enough of the traffic to see it's a VPN and not an HTTPS connection. I'm assuming that could be obscured in some way but then I've heard even if you can't see the contents you can generally tell it's not HTTPS by looking at the traffic patterns?

<comment><USER19> You can make it more difficult, but short of actually disconnecting China's network from the rest of the Internet entirely I don't think there's any way to completely prevent it.

I had a run-in with a particularly aggressive captive portal last week that kept injecting ads into unencrypted pages (if I'm traveling on one of your vehicles, _I don 't want to buy tickets to travel with you_), but fortunately didn't firewall outgoing port 22 so I could use sshuttle to route 0.0.0.0/0 via an SSH connection to my personal server. This works with pretty much any server you can run Python on, so I don't know of a good way to stop it unless you're willing to block anyone from SSHing outside of the country (thus preventing e. g. Chinese companies with a global market from running servers in other countries).

<comment><USER20> ssh sessions reveal enough that an interactive session, a file transfer (scp), and sshuttle routing someone web browsing look quite different from one another. Sure, you can multiplex and throw in extra traffic, but it's not trivial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Expats/foreigners/immigrants make heavy use of VPNs according to friends I have. I don't live in China but if I did and this was successful this would be a serious reason to consider leaving for me, access to the internet and www is just too important nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER22> So what we need is a VPN that looks like https traffic or is https forbidden in China too? Is anyone working on this?

After a quick read it's apparent that even the most sophisticated defences are going to be open to the one endpoint having loads of data against it. It would need lots of different "real" IP connections and my guess peer to peer would be difficult too.

Statistics and machine learning will always be good enough to evade attempts I can think of here.

<comment><USER23> Life finds a way? I could encode 0 to "duck" and 1 to "cat" and I can tell you "duck duck cat duck, cat duck duck cat" and that's 0010 1001, i.e. the letter I. Obviously it need to be more sophisticated than this. Then, you can use the channels that no one's looking at, but I guess China is looking everywhere.

<comment><USER22> That's fine but still most of your traffic will go to a single endpoint. It'd be easy to analyse patterns in most surfing protection solutions...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> You should not deal with censorshipping countries. Period. That's a dead end road. If you are Chinese - fight for your natural rights. If you are a foreigner: let them alone and try to do business with countries that provide more freedom or that are at least on the right track (I fully understand that not every country is equal or values freedom equally - but at least they should move in the right direction).

<comment><USER5> this mostly correct.

gotta love when people don't say this about china right away here, but talk about building your product inside a platform owned by fb or apple and you get the warnings instantly.

also, this is a good time to remember everyone to at least run a 1mbps tor node at home. costs nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm headed to china next week for a few weeks. I need access to at least Gmail. Are there any suggestions here on an easy way to get around it for a VPN noob? I'm usually fine using PrivateInternetAccess but I'm sure that is blocked there.

<comment><USER26> VPNs still work; ExpressVPN gives good results. Although I usually just forward gmail to outlook for the time being and will just use that for the weeks I am there.

<comment><USER17> The thing is that they block Gmail MX from time to time. Don't use google mail for work there

<comment><USER26> No I forward all to Outlook.com and send from there as well. Sucks but works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> ssh -D8888 - SOCKS proxy port 8888. SSH is not VPN ;)

</comment><comment><USER28> Time to get funds for 443 port vpn startups. ;)

Hint: TLS encrypted traffic following an appropriate browser-style handshake cannot be distinguished from "legitimate" https.

<comment><USER29> Yes, it can. By watching the size and timing of flows with 'regular HTTPS' traffic vs 'VPN HTTPS' traffic, it can be distinguished.

<comment><USER30> So write a program that emulates 'regular HTTPS' traffic patterns. On the technical side of things, I'm pretty sure the VPNs have the upper hand in this game of cat and mouse.

<comment><USER31> GFW does not just inspect traffic, it actively probes server IP:ports looking for its responses, can replay packets you sent legitimately, and can impersonate IP addr behind GFW.

As in, it is not only a passive observer periodically resetting connections, it will also make its own to test the waters

<comment><USER32> I would love to see a write up about that. Got a source?

<comment><USER33> Here's a few that I dug up from 15 mins of googling:

\- In-Depth Analysis of the Great Firewall of China. Has other good sources at the bottom: [http://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/116/archive/fall2016/ctang.pdf](http://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/116/archive/fall2016/ctang.pdf)

\- How China is Blocking Tor: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0447](https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0447)

\- Summary of "How China is Blocking Tor" from MIT Review: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/427413/how-china- blocks-t...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/427413/how-china-blocks-the- tor-anonymity-network/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


DiCE Molecules - <AUTHOR> https://axial.substack.com/p/axial-dice-molecules <comment><USER2> Cool technology, does their lead program perform better than Secukinumab?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - to be determined on DiCE's lead program; but the idea is to replace an antibody with a small molecule to gain delivery advantages.</comment></comment>


Armistice Day: November 11, 1918 to November 11, 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anecdotes-from-the-archive/armistice-day-november-11-1918-to-november-11-2018/ <comment><USER2> _" Unfortunately, propaganda and self-justification runs strongly as a theme through much wartime and postwar literature—including in this magazine,[...]"_

And that is as close to apologizing and assuming guilt as I've seen from the press that pushed millions to death a century ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> I went to the service in our local village. The read out a list of the dead, just from our village, just from 1918. The last name we were told, died on 11/11/18\. I don't know if he was shot on that day, or died from earlier injuries, but I'm having a hard time 'rationalising' that one. Did he know peace was imminent, was he relieved to find out it was all over before he died. Or was it someone who had nearly made it, before having it all snatched away?

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately he was likely killed in combat: [http://www.historynet.com/world-war-i-wasted-lives-on- armist...](http://www.historynet.com/world-war-i-wasted-lives-on-armistice- day.htm)

> _On November 11, 1918, Armistice Day, the American Expeditionary Forces > (AEF) on the Western Front in France suffered more than thirty-five hundred > casualties, although it had been known unofficially for two days that the > fighting would end that day and known with absolute certainty as of 5 > o'clock that morning that it would end at 11 a.m._

<comment><USER5> The war was extended for a sound byte. The elite Powers that Be let these young men continue to kill each other for a cute quote for the history books:

"And on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent."

Shameful.

<comment><USER6> A peace deal has to be set to come into effect at some point in the future so that the message can be spread along a very long line of soldiers, some of whom may not have regular radio contact or be in small pockets. Not only do you need time to inform everyone, you also have to set it at a specific time after everyone is informed, so that you can make preperations with that in mind - for example, getting ready to recover stranded wounded after the ceasefire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The European Powers took notice, and came to the conclusion modern wars were > short and winnable [...]

and now [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Federation#International_recognition)

<comment><USER8> What does the pre-WWI view of wars have to do with Russia's annexation of Crimea?

What about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus) ?

WWI, WWII, the French and US involvement in Vietnam, the Soviet and US involvements in Afghanistan, etc. have long demonstrated that the modern wars aren't all 'short and winnable'.

Though the 1990–1991 Gulf War, plus the US invasions of Grenada and Panama, may have helped re-foster that view in the US.

<comment><USER9> I would say that modern wars are 'short and winnable'. It's the nation building part that isn't.

<comment><USER8> What does a 'war' end?

War in Afghanistan (2001–present) - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_\(2001%E2%80%93present\))

When specifically did that war end and nation building begin? Who won the war?

EDIT: Is the Global War on Terrorism / Operation Enduring Freedom a "war"? It certainly feels like an never-ending war.

<comment><USER10> You forgot [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1992%E2%80%9...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_\(1992%E2%80%931996\))

And [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War) before that.

And a long list even before that.

<comment><USER8> I didn't omit the second - see my g'parent posting.

I left out the first because top-level thread comment concerned European 'Great Powers', and because I wanted to give a specific counter-point with the major world superpower.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Is Planning a New Low-Cost MacBook, Pro-Focused Mac Mini - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-08-20/apple-is-said-to-plan-revamped-low-cost-macs-to-reignite-sales <comment><USER2> At this point I'm pretty sure that Bloomberg just writes articles about Apple because they want the ad revenue and page clicks. They've been way way off the mark plenty of times. Same with the WSJ.

These are pretty vague rumors, only slightly different than what we've seen on other Mac sites for a while now. As with anything Apple, I don't believe it until Tim Cook says it.</comment>


Angel.co introduces a new job matching service. Salary and equity info. - <AUTHOR> https://angel.co/talent

<comment><AUTHOR> I just received an email...I don't see any official announcement but it appears to be new.

It's very interesting that they disclose equity provided to the employees. Has anyone seen this publicly disclosed before?</comment>


Facebook acquires Hot Potato  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hotpotato.com/post/982892868/weve-moved-to-facebook

<comment><USER2> Meet the new Facebook Places team!

<comment><USER3> facebook said they have been working on places for 8 months or so / Techcrunch reported hotpotatoe being acquired about a month ago...

If they kept the secret for 7 months I would be impressed; perhaps a talent acquisition to work on places (and some added IP)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations!

>"Facebook is still small"

Is that an understatement?

</comment><comment><USER5> Anybody to explain what was Hot Potato site anyway? I see it's a site where you register and post stuff. But what was unique for it?

<comment><USER6> It started out as a way to talk about events that were happening now. So, you'd more or less check into an event and be able to converse. Then, it turned into another twitter clone, where you could post what you were doing, listening too, whatever, and then you could have inline conversations about it. Nothing terribly exciting, but enough to get the attention of Facebook. I'm guessing this was all for talent and nothing more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it true they are shutting them down?

<comment><USER8> [http://blog.hotpotato.com/post/982892868/weve-moved-to- faceb...](http://blog.hotpotato.com/post/982892868/weve-moved-to-facebook)

that's what they say in their blog about it. No new registrations, a path to download your data, and shut down in about a month.

<comment><USER7> probably they are going to use their core engine or something like that. or probably not. who knows...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: IFTTT Pricing Model – $20k - <AUTHOR> I've been told by an account manager at IFTTT that the pricing model starts at $20k, and that it is the lowest available price. I think that seems a bit on the high side for a small startup looking to integrate.<p>Have you any experience with the IFTTT pricing model and if so, what are you paying for the integration, how many active users using the integration? <comment><USER2> Have you looked into using Zapier instead? Why do you need to use IFTTT?

<comment><AUTHOR> Zapier is awesome and we are integrating with them. The nice thing about IFTTT is that they are free for users.</comment></comment>


The Future of VLANs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scottlowe.org/2013/06/20/thinking-out-loud-the-future-of-vlans/

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the post is right - we need to be rethinking some of the abstractions in data center networking so we can deploy apps with specific network topologies and performance guarantees, and still be logically isolated from each other. This is especially important for bandwidth and latency sensitive apps like scientific computing that really care about what's happening at the "Top of the Rack" switches. I'm not sure that VLANs alone cut it.</comment>


Things you Should Stop Doing - <AUTHOR> http://www.productivity501.com/2007/04/17_things_you_s.html <comment><USER2> ...and so, the diggification (as witnessed on reddit) begins on news.ycombinator...

<comment><AUTHOR> I specifically avoided phrasing the article as a "list of X things" for that reason. I submitted it because this article had a mix of suggestions that I found particularly interesting and sufficiently relevant.</comment></comment>


Tesla whistleblower complaint points to accounting oddities, two sets of books - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/orthereaboot/status/1225099330903736320 <comment><USER2> I'm not an accountant, however, all the large corps I've worked at had 2 sets of books. The accounting group has its own set of books based on accounting rules. The tax group has another set based on tax laws and regulations. One difference I know about is depreciation/amortization. A made up example is: gov't gives tax incentive for certain investments by allowing the asset to depreciate over 3 years, but the accountants say the useful life is actually 5 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, as some commenters point out in the thread, it's possible that there are benign explanations. It's Tesla's responses to his inquiries about the discrepancies and firing him which raise red flags IMO.

In-house accounting software is also a rarity even at large corporations with two sets of books.</comment></comment>


U.S. Net access not all that speedy ("Pathetic") - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2007-06-25-net-speeds_N.htm <comment><USER2> I remember reading a post by Matz about how he hated to leave Japan because his connection there was so much faster than what he ended up with elsewhere.

This kind of reminds me of the the gas consumption issues though, maybe instead of complaining about slow download speeds, we should also focus on making websites that are not bloated to all hell. I was on a "web 2.0" website a few days ago and each page load was coming with 250-500k of data. Each page! We seriously need to figure out a way to integrate the javascript libraries (prototype, etc) into browsers, or to just stop making everything sparkle just because we can.

<comment><USER3> And we should get rid of images too! Everyone should use lynx! The market will drive the technology - not the other way around. If people want sparkle, connections will get faster.

<comment><USER2> Yes, which is how the American car market has worked for the past seventy years, and also the reason why we'll hit the peak oil point in the next -5 to 30 years. But you're right, learning from mistakes is so passe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In many of those countries people live in big and tall apartment buildings, so dropping an expensive fiber to just one block of those gives you TONS of users. Compare that to a typical rural suburbs in US, where you have to put down miles and miles of cable just to cover a big subdivision of standalone houses.

Besides, raw download speed is not that important IMO. Well, perhaps for video. I wish browsers could download more than two files at the same time. I believe this limitation is pretty much obsolete these days.</comment>


Show HN: Smooth UI, a React UI Library for Humans - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/smooth-code/smooth-ui <comment><USER2> So is the key point here a terse syntax for using actual CSS syntax (as opposed to react CSS) to create component wrappers?

It's not really clear what this is.

Lack of a giant obvious demo link really annoys me with this sort of thing - "hey look at the code and all these words about our new visual offering".

<comment><AUTHOR> The real game changer in Smooth UI is the way to extend components. This is a CodeSandbox example, feel free to play with it! [https://codesandbox.io/s/7k8o4x7lj6](https://codesandbox.io/s/7k8o4x7lj6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks nice; very bootstrap-y. With all the component libraries out there today, it'd be nice to know what's different about this one? What does this library solve that others don't.

Great work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Smooth UI is not better than other libraries like Material UI or Ant UI but the focus is different. Smooth UI put the focus on developer experience, extending a style is very simple. Also it exposes some classes, you don't have to learn any API to extend components, you can simply inspect components and use the classes!

An example of extend: [https://codesandbox.io/s/7k8o4x7lj6](https://codesandbox.io/s/7k8o4x7lj6)

<comment><USER4> Writing !important to something I extend is not what I'd expect, it feels like a hack.

<comment><USER5> Looks like the example uses that because it would otherwise be overridden by the variant=primary (which seems to be the default) so explicitly overriding that variant would probably be more intuitive and not require the !important hack.

<comment><USER4> I did not dig into that, but I would expect some intuitive solution if they mention developer experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hate X for human tagline

<comment><USER7> I brought this up on a prominent package recently. You can see the discussion:

[https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/issues/2228](https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/issues/2228)

<comment> cup-of-tea I hate so much about pipenv despite it implementing some good ideas. Maybe I'm not with it any more...

<comment><USER7> This comment would be more relatable if you explained what you didn't like.

<comment> cup-of-tea Verbose, colourful output by default. Emoji in output (entirely unnecessary). It's essentially a GUI tool, not a CLI tool. The kind of tool that says "look at me! Look how much I'm doing! Aren't I amazing?". Good CLI tools just do their job. Oh and it's also unbearably slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So what is this, Bootstrap-remake? Sorry to sound so snarky but I myself have found it a lot easier to just make your own components and not depend on some random 3rd party library. Makes it a lot easier to customize and you might learn a thing or two. Sure it's not so easy to create them but once you learn how it pays off.

Okay now that I browsed through a little bit of the API it's all right, you don't have to invent everything by yourself if you use this. But I'm still adamant that you'd be better off to maybe rather copy the components to your source than use it as a dependency. Also there's no TypeScript support? After a lot of reluctance I've recently come to appreciate how nice TS makes your life when you avoid most of the silly bugs. Yes, sounds funny for most of people who haven't used dynamic languages but well... live and learn I guess.

<comment><AUTHOR> In fact, components like Radios and Checkboxes are very complex to create. So we use Smooth UI as a base, but it is intentionally very light (no big components).

About TypeScript, I am sorry, I am not a TypeScript user. TypeScript support would be awesome but I need some help on this!

<comment><USER9> Radio buttons and checkboxes are complex to create? What? Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER10> They're easy to create with HTML, but complex to create with React. This makes it easy again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How did this get to front page?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://smooth-ui.smooth-code.com/](https://smooth-ui.smooth-code.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really don't like it when "switch" toggles don't let you slide while holding down. if you want a toggle and don't want to implement sliding, just use a checkbox. Sliding toggles have a sliding affordance, and when it's not there, it screws with me. The buttons don't have an :active state either, seemingly, but that could just be limitation of their demo stylesheet.

</comment><comment><USER13> Anyone else experience odd Textarea resize behavior in the docs for this ? [https://smooth-ui.smooth-code.com/#textarea](https://smooth-ui.smooth- code.com/#textarea)

<comment><AUTHOR> Transition all is evil, thanks for spotting the bug. [https://github.com/smooth-code/smooth-ui/issues/8](https://github.com/smooth- code/smooth-ui/issues/8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The first example is of a button with poor padding, I'd fix that ASAP to impress potential users.

</comment><comment><USER2> I just read (skimmed) through the source code of [https://www.styled- components.com](https://www.styled-components.com)

Holy shit there's a lot of code there. What is it all doing - can anyone summarize?

As far as I can tell it's main selling point is letting you use pure native CSS in reactjs.

You can do that anyway in ordinary reactjs by writing:

<style>'put your css here'</style>

Put that straight into your react code and you can use _any native CSS_ in ReactJS.

<comment><USER15> If you can't understand what it's doing from the source code, maybe read the documentation?

I'm not a huge fan of Styled Components, but it's a way to write properly encapsulated styles for just that moment - You write 'regular CSS' that's scoped to exactly that component, so it can't leak out and affect other parts of your site.

<comment><USER2> I read the source code because I was trying to see how a solved problem needed so much code to implement.

<comment><USER15> I don't think Scoped CSS is a "solved problem".

Well actually, I think CSS Modules solved it in the most "perfect" way, but I'm willing to believe that others have problems I haven't experienced before :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Doordash accounts compromised - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailydot.com/debug/doordash-users-hacked/ <comment><AUTHOR> Check your account immediately if you use their service.</comment>


How Japan Plans to Build an Orbital Solar Farm - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/how-japan-plans-to-build-an-orbital-solar-farm <comment><USER3> Elon Musk's opinion the concept( not this one in particular though ).

[http://youtu.be/J_af0ow1__E?t=43m12s](http://youtu.be/J_af0ow1__E?t=43m12s)

Let me tell you one of my pet peeves: space solar power. Okay, the stupidest thing ever. If anyone should like space solar power, it should be me. I got a rocket company and a solar company. I should be really on it, ya know. But it's like, super obviously, not going to work because, ya know, if you have solar panels - first of all, it has to be better than having solar panels on Earth, so then you say, okay, solar panel is on-orbit, you get twice the solar energy - assuming that it is out of Earth's shadow - but you've gotta do a double conversion. You've gotta convert it from photon to electron to photon, back to electron. You've got to make this double conversion, so, okay, what's your conversion efficiency? Hmm. All in, you're going to have a real hard time even getting to 50%. [The solar cells are better.] It does not matter, put that cell on Earth then. See, that's the point I'm making. Take any given solar cell, is it better to have it on Earth, or is it better to have it on orbit? What do you get from being in orbit? You get twice as much sun - <USER2> case - but you've got to do a conversion. You've got to convert it the energy to photons - well, you have incoming photons that go to electrons, but you - you've gotta do two conversions that you don't have to do on Earth, which is you've got to turn those electrons into photons and turn those photons back into electrons on the ground, and that double conversion is going to get you back to where you started, basically. So why are you bothering sending them to bloody space. "I wish I could just stab that bloody thing through the heart." BTW - electron to photon converters are not free and nor is sending stuff to space. Then it obviously super doesn't work. Case closed. You'd think. You'd think case closed, but no. I guarantee it's gunna come up another ten times. I mean, for the love of God.

<comment><USER4> He's ignoring one constraint: land area. You need to put those panels somewhere. This approach let you perform the concentration somewhere you aren't renting real estate. For an extremely dense island nation like Japan this actually makes a lot of sense.

Now, this doesn't refute the issues Musk is bringing up here, but he isn't taking consideration of this factor at all.

<comment><USER5> Is this actually easier for an island nation than, say, floating solar panels in the surrounding waters? I assume Japan must see some benefit to space, but I'm having trouble working out just what it is.

<comment><USER6> What about the ecological effect on plant/plankton life in the ocean blocked by these floating panels? Assuming the cost of producing solar panels eventually comes down and we can cover large areas of the ocean, won't it take a toll?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another ignorant question ... so you have a massively powerful microwave beam pointed at a certain spot of your nation. What happens when it misses? Passes over the inhabited land that's infinitesimal fractions of a degree away from the target?

From 36000 miles, a few miles is a rounding error. Must take some huge tolerances to keep the beam pointed in the right place.

Is this even dangerous, or am I off base? I know they're nervous about nuclear since Fukishima, but unless I'm mistaken there's similar risks with this option.

<comment><USER8> I can't believe nobody has mentioned this yet: exactly this was one of the standard disasters in SimCity 2000, where "microwave" was one of the power plant types.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for saving me the trouble.

Microwave tech was awesome and cost effective until the first time the satellite got out of alignment and burned half the city down. I've been terrified of the idea ever since: you just can't make a weapon like that fail safe, and if you _do_ manage, then your throughput is too low to make it worth it.

<comment><USER10> What you possibly could do is to not have a single emitter but loads of them for each collector. So that a single satellite getting out of alignment would be harmless. Many emitters would need to get out of alignment pushing the beam in the same direction for it to be harmful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wouldn't a structure this large be inevitably hit by debris, whether from our own junk or stuff from elsewhere in space?

They'd need a gundam squadron to protect it too.

<comment><USER12> I was also wondering about the shadow it would cast...

<comment><USER13> I'm sure someone here will do the math, but short answer is that it wouldn't produce a noticeable shadow. Too small, too high.

<comment><USER3> The apparent size of the structure in the sky, is on the order of three magnitudes smaller compared to the size of the moon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems like the article discusses the challenges of building large structures in space.

Maybe the large-scale building techniques developed for this application would be useful for building large space stations. Space would be a lot cheaper if our spacecraft didn't have to use huge amounts of fuel to get out of earth's gravity well, which logically implies production [1] and refueling facilities in space using resources that don't have to be brought from Earth.

Which will probably be bigger structures than the ISS, which means the technology to build large structures in space is something which will be useful for reasons beyond solar power.

[1] At first, the spacecraft itself will probably be built on earth, and fuel will be the only thing produced in space.

</comment><comment><USER15> I really really want to see the numbers on this.

1\. How much mass are they putting into orbit?

2\. How much is it costing them to put that into orbit?

3\. How much energy will that generate?

4\. How long will the solar cells last?

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't think there are many power plants on Earth that function unattended and maintenance-free for very long. It will be nice if transport to space will be commonplace enough 25 years from now that sending a regular rotation of maintenance techs will be feasible.

</comment><comment><USER17> Pfft forget about using this for mere electrical power. Boil the sea to make it rain!

</comment><comment><USER18> This idea reminds me of the ION cannon from Command & Conquer.

</comment><comment><USER19> Death ray. Mwhahaha.</comment>


The four-day work week - <AUTHOR> http://superpositionkitty.com/2010/07/the-four-day-workweek/

<comment><USER2> I tried this. For about 4 months I worked for a business 4 days a week.

It was a complete nightmare because I had responsibilities. I found I had to fit 5 days of work in 4, and the day I wasn't there, it didn't seem much got done.

In conclusion, I found that it made me work a lot harder, disconnected me from ongoing projects, playing catch up, and missing important 'meetings'. Not to mention the fact that you're taking a decent paycut for no apparent reason.

That free day didn't end up being productive in any other way nor was it less stressful weeks.

Granted, that business was a mess. But still, I don't see this really working, unless everybody has the same day off and works 4 days a week. Then I think it would be super.

Also if more people work 4 days a week but don't take the same day of the week off, the company turns into a country club, with more gossip and "I wasn't told anything about this" commonly heard.

My (hurt) 5c.

<comment><AUTHOR> >> But still, I don't see this really working, unless everybody has the same day off and works 4 days a week. Then I think it would be super

As there's only (currently) two of us, this is quite easy. I have to admit that I wouldn't recommend trying it in situations such as yours was, which is why I added that final line in the article.</comment></comment>


Crayon programming language - <AUTHOR> https://crayonlang.org <comment> d--b > It is most succinctly described as a "Loosely typed Java or C#", "Curly > brace version of Python", or "JavaScript that's been fixed"

Umph, these are not good selling points.

\- Strong typing is one of the top features of C# and Java.

\- Python is all about math-friendly syntax (ie no curly braces and semi colons).

\- And claiming to fix javascript is presumptuous.

At best, this makes it sound like a toy version of kotlin.

<comment><USER2> Man, you sound pretty grumpy about it. I'm pretty sure that the author does not mean "just like Java but with no types". Python is all about the syntax (and it's certainly not all about "math-friendly" syntax), though the syntax was an interesting choice. "Fixing JavaScript" means different things to different people, but I take it to mean that crayon differs in some aspects that annoyed the author about JavaScript.

Notice that the author was rather effective at getting us to think about the features of these languages and how crayon fits in.

<comment> d--b Sorry, I didn't mean to sound grumpy. I just wanted to say that as a C#, Python and Javascript developer, I am put off by the arguments put forward in the landing page.

Saying that is as forgiving as Javascript, as productive as Python and as robust as C# is a better way to sell the language than saying it is C# minus typing, Python minus easy syntax and Javascript minus problems...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I very highly recommend Crayons. I have been using them since I was maybe 4 or 5 years old, and still find it useful to this day. It is a simple joy.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not really sure I understand what Crayon fixes for Javascript. Based on my understanding from the intermediate tutorial it seems to be mostly identical to Javascript, with a game library built in. Can somebody help me understand what makes this language stand out?

<comment><USER5> Hello, I'm actually the creator of Crayon and was surprised to find this showed up here.

Yes, the syntax very closely resembles JavaScript but there's more traits from static languages such as Java and less malleability than JS. For example libraries and dependencies are resolved at compile time and you can make it print out a tree of dependencies at compile time for use in environments that need to be properly sandboxed. Also, fields must be explicitly declared. This allows a lot more things like simple typos to be caught at compile time. The other thing is that it's export-ready for the platforms it supports. For example, when exporting to iOS, it generates a full XCode project. While this is similar to frameworks or languages like Cordova or Haxe, the thing that is unique to Crayon is the localizability of the language and libraries into non- English languages. This is still in the prototype phase, but currently works for Japanese and Spanish: [https://crayonlang.org/gengo](https://crayonlang.org/gengo)

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the explanatory answer.

Localization seems like a two-edged sword. Wouldn't it cause a spilt in the community when it comes to tutorials and documentation? Especially if the community is small.

In Excel I repeatedly faced the problem that the formula "programming" language was my own language and not English, which meant that all English Excel formulas I found had to be translated. In my opinion the benefit of writing my native language does not outweigh the problems of constantly translating formulas.

What are your thoughts on this problem? Have you thought of any ways to prevent such problems?

<comment><USER6> That's what contributors are for. OSS has always been dependent on localization support from contributors, especially for documentation.

<comment><USER4> I understand what you mean, but I don't think you understand my point.

I am not thinking about the official documentation of the language. Normally translating the explanations in the official documentation only requires contributers.

However when someone makes a tutorial series or similar, that series will normally only be limited to one language because they will write the actual code itself in their language.

I think this would split an already small community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm kind of upset the squid game doesn't have an on screen counter. I played for about 15 minutes... pretty sure I got 30+

<comment><USER5> I will get right on that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No Linux support?

<comment><USER5> Alas, it's true. While the platforms Crayon programs can export to can run on Linux, the compiler itself was originally written in C# back when it was just a tinker-hobby project and does too many Windows-y things. The OSX support is based on Mono but is somewhat flakey in certain environments. Eventually I have plans to migrate the compiler to another language (possibly Crayon itself).

<comment><USER9> It looks like you're using Visual Studio 2015. Could you rewrite it into .NET Core so that it can run on Linux?

I like your idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't care about the rest of your website if my blood pressure is 5000, thanks flappy bird clone.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting project. I'll test it on my 9yo son. Maybe the Squid will convince him to stop moving commands in Scratch and start typing them instead :)

</comment><comment><USER12> What a fun name for a programming language.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is amazing! I like the syntax and the projects vision. Really appreciate this effort!

</comment><comment><USER14> I love basically everything about this project. Nice work, bookmarking :)

</comment><comment><USER15> I was excited but no Linux support.. rats.</comment>


Google's Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Doodle Game - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.co.nz

<comment><USER2> I am missing the game aspect here.

<comment><USER2> ah, it was because i was on an idevice. it's rather obvious on a computer :)</comment></comment>


Plea HN: Please use the HN bookmarklet - <AUTHOR>

When submitting external links, please could you start using the bookmarklet tool available here http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html because if you're submitting a URL that has been submitted before, it will redirect you instead of posting a duplicate.<p>*I know there have been many discussions about the bookmarklet, but the more we drill it into the community, the better posting etiquette will get. <comment><USER2> It also redirects you using the regular submission form; i've submitted many a site or news item only to be redirected to an existing thread.

Methinks there's something wrong with the filter.

<comment><USER3> Duplicates normally have slightly different URLs: maybe an extra /, or HTTPS instead of HTTP, or added query string parameters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure I am missing something, but if this is the desired behavior, why not mandate it in the UI, why give users the option to not use the bookmarklet?

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html></comment>


Salon.com wants to fight ad-blockers by using your PC to mine cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/13/salon-com-wants-to-fight-ad-blockers-by-using-your-pc-to-mine-cryptocurrency/ <comment><USER2> The idea of using browser cycles to mine cryptocurrency is nothing new. Another recent effort: [https://oysterprotocol.com/](https://oysterprotocol.com/) .

The problem is that savvy users will install additional plugins to block these Javascript programs from running, the same way that they use Adblock. Unsavvy users will just have a shorter battery life.

Another effort in this space is Brave, and Basic Attention Tokens (BAT). Instead of expending browser resources to mine, the idea is that people start using a special browser (Brave) that dispenses BATs to the websites you dwell the most on / get the most value out of. Then presumably the site that receives the BAT could exchange them for USD.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey Guys,

I am the new CMO of www.Oysterprotocol.com, I would love to help answer your technical questions with our Founder

[https://medium.com/oysterprotocol/cmo-hire-infrastrucure- and...](https://medium.com/oysterprotocol/cmo-hire-infrastrucure-and-testnet- b-progress-update-e6fcad9b54b6)

Chris Garner

</comment><comment><USER4> Salon is completely missing the point of adblockers. Half the reason I install them to begin with is so that my computer stops pegging the CPU, spinning up the fans and killing my battery life just to view a goddamn text file. Mining cryptocurrency as I browse doesn't fix that in the slightest. They're solving a problem for them, not for me, so I'll pass.

<comment><USER5> Salon says that they will only use your unused CPU cycles, not sure how true is that, but their site appears equally responsive with the Crypto mining option enabled + adblock vs just adblock.

I am willing to give them a shot as long as this claim holds true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well there another addition to my hosts file. Being redirected to 0.0.0.0.</comment>


Enterprise Information Security (OpenSSH, IAM, Fundamentals, and More) - <AUTHOR> https://infosec.mozilla.org/ <comment><USER2> Under Fundamentals > Principles > Isolation:

> [Do Not] Allow tools remotely executing code on systems from a centralized > location (single Puppet Master, Ansible Tower, Nagios, etc. instance) across > multiple services.

I wil stress a point made to IT Ops a few years back: Configuration Drift can be more of an organizational risk than a well audited single repo for configuration. A separate Puppet for each environment, or each datacenter, can be asking for trouble when you're asking admins to manually keep data in sync.

And if you automate the synchronization, what's the point of splitting it?

<comment><USER3> This part seems to be written by somebody who's never had under their care more than a dozen of servers at a time. What's the alternative for managing configuration across a modest hundred of servers if you de facto can't use CFEngine/Puppet/Chef or deployment tools like Ansible?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The section on openssh misses some things like ssh certificates:

SSH certificates are a CA type model for openssh, where you can trust one key, and anything it signs will be trusted, great for stuff like cloud/server deployments and reimaging, way way too many people either blindly trust new ssh keys, or just disable server fingerprint checking entirely, opening yourself up to trivial MITM attacks.

you can also restrict user keys themselves to a subset of ssh functionality, rather than trying to lock down individual users via ssh config etc.

You should be careful specifying an explicit list of ciphers/kex/key/etc acceptable algos, because the openssh defaults and included algos have changed with time, and by setting an explicit list, you will not get any new ones as they are added (for instance they have recently added experimental post quantum crypto support), nor will weak ones be removed. If you need to add options to connect to older servers that do not support newer, stronger crypto its recommended you prefix them with + so they are added in addition to the reasonably secure defaults, not replacing them.

The mozilla recommendations list also fails to mention that stuff like sftp can be chrooted, and other ssh functionality disabled so it functions more like a secure alternative to ftp, and less like a tool to run remote commands.

<comment><USER5> that is true, though contributions can be made (I mean, PR welcome!) it would be a great addition there's also some basic scripts here [https://github.com/mozilla- iam/federated_access_proxy/tree/m...](https://github.com/mozilla- iam/federated_access_proxy/tree/master/scripts)

<comment><USER6> I don't see a link to the repository if we wanted to submit a PR.

Also might be worth mentioning that there is some alternative tooling to deliver multi-factor / single sign on and short lived certificates to SSH like teleport: [https://github.com/gravitational/teleport](https://github.com/gravitational/teleport)

Disclaimer: I work for Gravitational, the company behind teleport

<comment><USER7> There are "improve this document" links at the top of each of the pages (a bit confusing, as that link doesn't really belong with the site navigation links). e.g. the OpenSSH doc lives at [https://github.com/mozilla/infosec.mozilla.org/blob/master/d...](https://github.com/mozilla/infosec.mozilla.org/blob/master/docs/guidelines/openssh.md). It looks like the root project is [https://github.com/mozilla/infosec.mozilla.org](https://github.com/mozilla/infosec.mozilla.org).

<comment><USER6> Thanks... I completely missed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome resource. Kubernetes sure is the hot thing right now, I just wish I had any excuse to use it.

Can anyone recommend a more general resource? Possibly something that covers a wider range of topics like intranets, VPNs, self-hosted servers, etc? I know someone who thinks he's all that but seriously needs to read more of this stuff.

He values private networks over SSL (as in public websites don't even have SSL), salts salts and decrypts stuff by looping through timestamps within a range close to the transmission, and more.

</comment><comment><USER9> They might want to add a page about not publishing their security guidelines for potential attackers to read and learn about potential gaps.

It's security through obscurity, sure. But if someone reads this and thinks there is indication of low-hanging fruit, they become a more tempting target.

On the other hand, by posting this, the organization will learn from the collective wisdom of anyone reading and providing comment (and perhaps any resulting other activity), so at least this has potential to provide improvement.</comment>


You can spend $9,599 on a Mac Pro, but should you? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/12/you-can-spend-9599-on-a-mac-pro-but-should-you/ <comment><USER4> Of course not. Why should I?

I can build a PC to the same specs!

Of course it won't run OS X well, it won't have the same exact specs, it will have severely worse construction with wires hanging here and there and huge fans, it won't be as silent, it will be bigger, components wont be selected, adjusted and tested to work together, and it might end up costing the same amount of money or near-ish after I add all the options (like the SSDs and thunderbold). And I'll have to support it myself, replacing parts if they fail, instead of just taking it to the Applestore for a fix. But that won't stop me saying it's overpriced.

<comment><USER5> Or you can buy an HP Z820. OSX is pretty much moot for workstation grade machines. The software is all cross platform.

And wires dangling everywhere? To get anything other than comedy storage, you're going to need a pile of lightning devices hanging off it.

And don't give me all that crap about Apple being tried and tested - <USER2> MacBook Pro I had was totally unreliable.

<comment><USER6> Yep, the new Mac Pro is going to be a pain for IT support to move to another desk or office with all its bits hanging off it.

That is, of course, if the new Mac Pro ever makes it into the enterprise given Apple's track record in that area. I always what happened to the IT manager who convinced their boss to invest heavily in a few XServes... :-)

<comment><USER4> > _That is, of course, if the new Mac Pro ever makes it into the enterprise > given Apple 's track record in that area._

Track record? You mean the inroads they've been making for like 5 years with the iPhone and the iPad?

That said, Mac Pro is not for the enterprise. It's for big calculations: video, 3D, pro audio, scientific computing, etc.

It's not for running Lotus Domino and accessing some VB internal app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since nobody here seems to have access to newegg here's the closest

CPU: Xeon E5-2697 12-core 2.7 Ghz - $2749.99

Video: AMD FirePro S9000 6GB - $2199.99 ea. (close as I could get) - <USER3> $4,399.98

RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 64GB (8 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL10Q2-64GBZL - $599.99

SSD: SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE1T0BW 2.5" 1TB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) $569.99

Motherboards that handle 64GB of RAM look to be generally under $400

Let's add $300 for case, PSU etc. and we're looking at ~$9000.

So even if the individual upgrades are badly priced (64GB of RAM for $800!), the entire system is actually pretty fairly priced at the top configuration. The tight integration of the parts, and I'm guessing sourcing directly from the manufacturers rather than through 3rd party parts builders, probably cuts lots of the BOM out. And there's no way Apple won't make a profit on these ugly things.

</comment><comment><USER8> From the article: "Going with these upgrade options, the Mac Pro with an AppleCare service plan comes to $5,148, about half the cost of the most- expensive computer you can configure. This is unquestionably an expensive workstation, though considered in the context of competing products like those from HP or Dell, you'll see that similarly specced PC workstations are in the same ballpark (though these dual-socket workstations make true apples-to-Apple comparisons more difficult, and it's harder to quantify the value of real drive bays and PCI Express slots)."

Whenever I've looked at non-cheap machines, independent of OS (I'm often flexible between macos and linux), the difference between an apple machine and something from another major vendor, for as closely-comparable machines I can find, is often a fairly small percentage. And considering the unique features of the devices -- usually better (exterior) case design, MacOS, etc., it's pretty reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER9> If Apple is being true to form, the Mac Pro will be competitively priced, with two important caveats:

1\. No option to use non-premium components. The two most obvious examples are the fact that you can't replace the Xeon with an i7 or the FirePro with a Radeon.

2\. The prices will change slowly or not at all over time. $400 for a RAM upgrade might be reasonable now, but it won't be in a years time.

<comment><USER10> When I bought my 2008 Mac Pro, it was actually slightly cheaper than any equivalent name-brand PC workstation.

I still don't understand the target market for the new model, though. Who wants multiple graphics cards but limited RAM and no disks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> we spend $10k on individual servers all the time, among other things.

to some people, and most businesses, $10k is not a lot of money. especially for a capital good that can be purchased or leased without spending $10k of cash.

for example, i can imagine upgrading an editing bay or scientific workstation for $10k is kind of a no-brainer.

to put this into terms that people on HN can understand:

$10k buys you about 6 months of cc2.8xlarge on ec2 on-demand.

<comment><USER12> Especially when you bill out the editing bay at $100/hr or more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems to me that everyone complaining about needing to deal with PC repairs has never had a business-class PC. The business and consumer support are completely different beasts. For business products, at least HP and Dell will send someone to you to fix it. These are competent techs who can do almost any repair/replacement on the spot. As far as I know Apple does not offer this level of support.

</comment><comment><USER14> That's about the price of the original mac512 with an external hard drive in todays dollars. 1984 (Mac 2795 + 10MB hd 1200) when factoring for inflation (2013) $9,009.01 [http://www.davemanuel.com/inflation- calculator.php](http://www.davemanuel.com/inflation-calculator.php)?

</comment><comment><USER15> The FirePro line is the most expensive of the graphics cards. Compare the actual specs to desktop cards like the Radeon R9 series (which top out at $500 or $600 each retail) and you will see that it is far more likely that Apple is taking those chips and using them.

<comment><USER12> The benchmarks for these are tricky. "Pro" cards have more floating point "double" performance, but most games only use the less accurate but faster "single" mode.

<comment><USER16> If you buy this to play games (or rather - if game performance is where your computer needs max out), you're probably a person with enough money to not sweat a $10k computer purchase more than I mull over a fancy meal with the missus. Now, if you're a 3D artist (maybe game designer?) this looks really nice (caveat: not a 3D artist). So, designing fancy games - Mac Pro. Playing said fancy games - anything from iPhone to home-built gaming rig will be more worth it.

<comment><USER12> While this system has a lot of GPU under the hood, many 3D applications aren't properly leveraging OpenCL or are using CUDA (Nvidia). I'm hoping that this pushes more towards OpenCL because of how much capability is there. Some rendering engines for popular apps like Maya support CUDA exclusively which is trouble. Still, nobody is building render farms out of Mac Pros.

Right now this is geared towards video editors and audio engineers where more GPU translates directly into faster rendering and where you can never have enough 4K screens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can get almost 3 base model Mac Pros for that price.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does the PC market offer a similar clone case as the one on the Pro?

<comment><USER5> No we have better ones.

You know which we can replace bits of.

<comment><USER4> So the kind that needs personal hassle?

I'll pass, I'm a professional in another field, not a PC mechanic.

<comment><USER19> Visiting an Apple store to have a part replaced is free if your time is worth nothing.

<comment><USER4> Or you know, I can send it and get it back. What kind of professional doesn't have a backup machine or two?

Heck, a professional of the kind that needs a Mac Pro can also afford an assistant to take to the Apple store...

Nor it's like checking the damage on my home-built PC, tinkering, ordering parts and replacing them will take me less time...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> SteamOS on a Mac Pro:

The most elitist of elite gaming machines

</comment><comment><USER21> Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

<comment><USER22> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742893)

<comment><USER23> sorry quarterto, this is actually The Fourth Law of Hacker News - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4722251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4722251)

<comment><USER22> Which by some fluke is exactly twice as old as my law!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> never</comment>


This Wii emulator lets you buy actual games from Nintendo's Shop Channel - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/this-wii-emulator-lets-you-buy-actual-games-from-nintendos-shop-channel/#p3 <comment><USER2> I've been overwhelmingly impressed with Dolphin as of late. Their progress on GameCube games has been particularly impressive; I was able to play through TimeSplitters: Future Perfect recently.

After this update, I wonder how long before Nintendo blocks Dolphin traffic.</comment>


Video job applications next for recruiting? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theshire.co/jobs <comment><USER2> Let me get this right. A recruiter posts a video job ad, then a job applicant submits a video pitch to the recruiter on why they are the best candidate for the job?

And the pre-screening questions, if a potential job candidate doesn't get answer the pre-screening questions right they are not able to apply for the job?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes Boombuster. That is correct.</comment></comment>