What is a fork, and how GitHub changed its meaning - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2019/05/24/What-is-a-fork.html <comment><USER2> It's a little funny to focus on GitHub's fork/pull-request model if you're trying to critique their centralization and lock-in. Every single successful open source project — on GitHub or not — has a canonical "source" branch and some sort of organization/leadership that decides what goes in. I'd argue that GitHub's behavior here isn't a power grab so much as a reflection of reality.

The "real" lock-in is with the _discussion_ model — on both issues and pull requests — and the organizational structure you're able to set up. It's easy to move the source code to another service. Heck, you can even email patches to maintainers of a project on GitHub without creating an account. It's not easy to move historical discussions/reviews or "commit bits"/maintainership roles, and of course you can't participate in reviews of an emailed patch that a maintainer PRs for you unless you create an account.

<comment><USER3> I'd argue that at least their API indicates they try to reduce rather than reinforce this lock-in. The API lets you build tools like [https://github.com/colmsjo/github-issues- export](https://github.com/colmsjo/github-issues-export) to automatically export data from issues and other project data stored outside of git.

Moving this data is still not trivial but I don't think GitHub could unilaterally make it much easier.

([https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/](https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/))

<comment><USER4> I'd love to see a standard develop for storing this information in-repo. GitHub could certainly drive such an initiative.

<comment><USER5> You might be thinking about fossil. Every feature is in-repo.

[https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki](https://fossil- scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki)

<comment><USER6> That looks really cool. Is anybody already using this?

<comment><USER7> Well, SQLite is using it of course ;-)

Other large projects include Tcl/Tk and many related extensions, as well as all the cool stuff I write:

[http://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/](http://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know if it's correct to characterize Github's model as a power grab. The design of Github definitely pushes things in a more centralized direction, but I think that approach is superior in many cases and it's not purely for profit.

For many projects, having a single "canonical" version is the best experience for both users of the project and developers. Linux is large and important enough that it may make sense to have many different distros running a slightly different set of patches and accept the overhead of managing multiple sources of truth. For smaller projects with more narrow contributor bases, it would be noisy and confusing.

<comment><USER9> > I don't know if it's correct to characterize Github's model as a power grab.

The important question would be if Github forks and pull requests are an open protocol or attached to the platform. I'm not aware if I can make a pull request from - say - bitbucket to github. Can I ? Then it's not a power grab. If not then redefinition of fork/pull request is an extend and extinguish move.

Edit: okay, extinguish is too harsh. GitHub doesn't want to extinguish git.

<comment><USER10> Forks and PRs are UI sugar on top of Git operations, so it's technically open. That said, merging in a PR is an operation that touches 2 repos, with different user privileges, so I feel it would be hard (though not impossible) to make the UI work with multiple services, without adding extra cross-service auth headache.

<comment><USER11> That's only true for private repos though, for open source repos it would work just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a casual GitHub user, and for me the fork button enabled me to grab a copy of some other repo, make changes , commit to my github repo without perturbing the main project and still keeping an online history at github. Its a step above just downloading the zip file and below getting commit rights to the original project. If I just made a personal branch, then I would have everything but the online backup because I couldn't commit.

One example is used by many online learning companies: they provide some baseline of code for use in a course. you need to get it to use in the lessons (edit: and make changes that you want to save). You can download a zip, clone or fork the repo. zip and clone don't get you the online backup.

It would be interesting to see how many people use Github for the reasons cited in the article (using a fork as staging for a pull request) or like I do.

As I wrote this, it made me realize I am a parasite on GitHub and the projects I fork, since I rarely contribute back (mainly because I don't have anything useful).

<comment><USER13> You don't need a fork button for that.

      git clone ssh://example.com/repo.git
      [... Edit ...]
      git push ssh://myserver example.com/myrepo.git master

Benefit of the fork button is that GitHub links those repos on their site.

<comment><USER14> Ah yes, all of the students in GP's example need merely need to learn how to provision, DNS-associate, and maintain a server, then they can store their Git repositories on it. That will surely not add any undue overhead for them.

<comment><USER13> There is no need to run a server. This is only about the "fork" button. You could but GitHub.com in the place of example.com. Git hosting existed before GitHub.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't imagine doing pull requests over email, which this article notes is an original feature of git. Maybe kernel developers could handle it, but there are a lot of people who don't even know how to send plaintext emails and this would not be conducive to reviewing PRs on mobile. I definitely like the GitHub flow better than SourceHut's.

<comment><USER16> I shared this video on the Lobsters thread which seems to have been helpful for some:

[https://yukari.sr.ht/aerc-intro.webm](https://yukari.sr.ht/aerc-intro.webm)

Don't repost this, please, the official aerc announcement is coming in a few weeks.

I'm working on making a UI similar to GitHub's for reviewing patches which is built on email underneath, but can be used entirely on the web. The first step of this became available a few weeks ago, and now email threads are being rendered into a review UI which is similar to GitHub's with inline feedback and such:

[https://lists.sr.ht/~philmd/qemu/patches/5556](https://lists.sr.ht/~philmd/qemu/patches/5556)

This page is fairly new and still needs a bit more work towards mobile support, but I hope that gives you some more confidence in the platform. I intend to extend this so that you can also review patches from the web, which will generate emails on the mailing list, and prepare patchsets from the web as well. The end result will be a UI which is remarkably similar to GitHub in terms of usability on the web, but is backed up with distributed technologies and seamlessly integrates with the workflows of devs who would rather use email.

On the whole Sourcehut is actually quite a bit better at responsiveness than GitHub, too. Rather than a dedicated and inferior mobile site, almost all sr.ht pages are responsive and equally capable on all form-factors.

<comment><USER17> Friendly pedantry: in that video, you referred to vi as "vee"? :)

<comment><USER16> Yes, because that's what it's called :)

<comment><USER17> So you're saying that you don't care what the original author named his software, and you're going to say it your way, just to be different?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It is a curse that GitHub's code search can't code search forked repositories. If there's a really popular fork of a dead repo, it's code is invisible. Though, I have a feeling that is a technical, not business, limitation.

<comment><USER19> The Network graph has gotten increasingly buried in GitHub UX (currently it is under Insights > Network, at one point I recall it was a top level tab of its own) because it's a very useful power user feature, but can be super confusing to new users. (It's particularly a shame it is so hidden because IMNSHO it is the best commit graph that GitHub has, much more useful than the default commits list on the Code tab.)

The Network graph is extremely useful for getting a sense if a particular fork is dead and if there's a lot of activity happening on another fork (and letting you jump directly to other fork).

<comment><USER20> Assuming GitHub is willing to show you the graph, for some projects it isn't.

<comment><USER19> I've only seen GitHub not show the graph at all when the total fork count for a Repo was huge and they've since changed it to always try to show "top 100 most recently committed forks" instead as a performance optimization in that case.

Easiest example off the top of my head: [https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/network](https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/network)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > On GitHub, a fork refers to a copy of a repository used by a contributor to > stage changes they'd like to propose upstream

I'm not sure this is accurate and is the crux the argument. IMO a fork on GH refers to a "fresh" (in terms of the tooling around the repo, eg issues/PRs) copy of the repo on another account, which may be used as a branch to push to upstream but may also be the "traditional" fork, the difference is entirely in how the copy is used. If you've got a public "personal branch" with its own associated tooling it doesn't seem like a stretch to call that a fork, whether temporary and intended to be sent back upstream or not, and to me it's a difference without a distinction about why "personal branch" is a better term than "fork." Forking a repo (spinning off a dev section, including CI/CD/issue tracking/management -- a branch implies sharing that infrastructure IMO) isn't the same thing as forking a project (spinning off a competing project).

To the cathedral and bazaar points, I don't see how GH affects the development style at all. The only thing that really makes the mailing-list driven Linux dev more decentralized is that it's done via email... yet someone still chooses what goes into releases, maintains & hosts that mailing list/website mirror and could limit access, or the "core" team could simply email each other and lock out any public view. GH can be configured to be just as open (if needing their "fork" model to keep anyone from being able to push over the original hosted copy) or just as closed, depending on how the project is run. The cathedral and bazaar is about project philosophy and management, not the underlying tech, to my reading.

Given the disclaimer that the author is building a GH competitor my cynical thought is this is really marketing aimed at the programmer niche; I would have enjoyed it more as a contrast against centralization and the benefits of his (as I understand it) more free/open/decentralized competitor.

All that said, I think sr.ht/sourcehut is a cool project and can easily see myself switching to it. How have the ads in 2600 been working?

</comment><comment><USER22> I really like how github fork can be implemented as new HEAD etc references to the same objects. New commits refer to the original project's objects.

i.e. git's content addressing, intended for identical distributed objects also automatically enables de-duplication of identical centralized objects.

Regarding the article, it seems to be saying you can't bazazr-fork a project on github. I don't see why not - although the default _fork_ is associated with the forked project, why can't you start a new project, using a clone of the forked project?

<comment><USER16> >I really like how github fork can be implemented as new HEAD etc references to the same objects. New commits refer to the original project's objects.

This can be done (more effectively, actually) without the user's explicit involvement in the fork process. You can dedupe blobs across the entire platform on git push.

>Regarding the article, it seems to be saying you can't bazazr-fork a project on github

I'm not saying you _can 't_ (I thought that was clear enough), but that GitHub is designed to encourage you to use a different approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Fork distributes control over history and abstracts permission management away from the traditional git branch pattern so you don't clutter the namespace of the canonical remote but can still offer work.

Fork is almost nothing, it's just a useful pattern.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't understand. I forked quite some repos on GitHub, because they weren't maintained anymore or I needed some feature the maintainer wouldn't implement.

</comment><comment><USER25> In the absence of external energy inputs, decentralized systems tend toward centralization. I don't much like it, bit it's not really Github's fault that it happens.</comment>


Step-by-step guide to build a slackbot to schedule items on your calendar - <AUTHOR> https://www.nylas.com/blog/build-a-slack-bot-scheduler-in-30-minutes <comment><USER2> @annielcook thanks for the post! Really helpful guide that I used for my nonprofit IgniteSTEM!</comment>


The First Cookbook - <AUTHOR> http://ilovetypography.com/2017/05/31/the-first-cookbook/ <comment><USER2> If interested, here is a link to the first American cookbook...

[http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/](http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/)

What made this cookbook "American" is the full adaptation of legacy cultural cooking methods to the plant and animal life of the new continent.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great post!

Fascinating that some church leaders were against the fork because "God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks – his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks for them when eating."

<comment><USER4> Jobs described styluses similarly.. I wonder if he got it from a similar attack on forks</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Windows Phone underestimated? - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I'm planning to buy my first smart phone (yes, it's true). Despite being a Windows user in my laptop (and IOS in my Ipad), I am not a 'fanboy' of Microsoft - very far from that - but I think their phones are better than the market 'says'. I was an early adopter of Chrome, as I saw a lot of potential in it, but they got their market share quite slow. I have the same 'feeling' with windows phone. What is HN opinion?<p>Disclaimer: I don't have any connection with Microsoft - It's just genuine curiosity. I write this because every time I make more specific questions, I read in the comments that I'm paid to ask them, last one was about Meteor. <comment><USER2> Hardware is decent. Better responsiveness on their lower end hardware than Android on better, more expensive hardware. Still find iPhone tighter.

Development is not the pain/mess it is on Android. (See Android NDK for real pain.) However, Microsoft makes it arbitrarily painful to develop because they still refuse to support/conform APIs and protocols found on _every_ other platform from desktop to mobile, such as OpenGL (ANGLE doesn't count) and OpenAL for games, to Zeroconf (aka Bonjour on Apple platforms, but compatible implementations are found everywhere but from Microsoft and WinRT). Their C compiler still officially hasn't moved beyond C89 which is 2 standards out of date and particularly important for a lot of cross-platform open source native projects. (They've recently fixed it so they can at least compile Git, but refuse to make an honest attempt to make their compiler compliant to C99/C11.) And they arbitrarily broke compatibility with a lot of their Windows APIs making sure they alienate both developers from other platforms as well as those already in the Windows ecosystem.

Recent market analysis shows their marketshare is shrinking...around 2% worldwide. (Because the number of iOS and Android increases, not because they are losing customers.)

So just from marketshare numbers, I don't expect things to get substantially better than Microsoft even though I think their phone may be better than the Android counterparts. (Microsoft's culture is better suited for competing with Google, but in their current position, their best features in the phone make them compete with Apple which isn't going to end well if you remember their history, like Zune.)

And because development for WinRT is painful enough, most developers aren't going to bother for such a minor marketshare. (And monetization in the Windows Store is not much better than Android in aggregate...which means it is bad. Nowhere close to iOS.)

Android+iOS already gives developers what they are looking for. Android has mass marketshare. iOS has monetization and the ability to make apps that 'wow' people.

So if you want to buy a phone and just want the phone, go for it as it isn't that bad of a phone. But don't expect the marketplace or ecosystem to go along with you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, it's very much underestimated. The OS itself is very good. Very good usability, very secure and has some awesome features (can't live without the live tiles!). The hardware is really good as well.

In my opinion it's crazy that most developers still skip the platform. There's really no excuse not to make your app cross platform nowadays, Xamarin has a really good offering for example. At least in Europe WP has a market share of 10% where iOS has 18%, so they're not that far off! In the US the difference is bigger though, but the world is larger than the US.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been using Windows Phones for a while after using iPhones for a while. The (former) Nokia hardware are solid and the entry level devices are being given away. Check out Cricket -- they are on the AT&T network but can't advertise it.

My basic take is that, so long as you don't have a big interest in Apps, it is a better device. It makes full use of the real estate and feels more like an integrated platform than a collection of functions.

But the App situation is still a mess -- no one builds for it. If you have anything you really want, check in advance.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _It makes full use of the real estate and feels more like an integrated > platform than a collection of functions._

I think you nailed it. These (and price) are the reasons that are making me consider it: I like small phones but I want them to be easy to interact with (large buttons).

> _But the App situation is still a mess -- no one builds for it._

I don't have interest in apps - for that I have an Ipad - I will use it almost as an old mobile phone. Anyway Windows 10 might be a game changer on this.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'm quitting my job to start a company. What should be on my checklist? - <AUTHOR>

For those who have gone this route, what are the things you forgot to do that came back to get you? What do you wish you'd done differently? <comment><USER2> \- Read up on customer development, then build your customer development plan. Getting your first customers is critical, so having the initial plan in hand is critical.

\- Make a list of assumptions about your business: what has to be true for you to succeed. Then find ways to empirically test those assumptions. Then test them! You don't want to spend a lot of time going down dead end paths. Keep doing this until you have a repeatable business model.

\- Identify your weaknesses (whether that is product development, marketing, sales, etc), and make sure you know how you are going to overcome those weaknesses (hiring, contracting, eliminating the need, etc). If you don't think you have any important weaknesses, you need to do more introspection.

\- Have fun and take breaks. Your business can become all-consuming. Don't let it, or it will soon suck the fun out of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Myself and my co-founder are doing this in January. We're hoping to get in YC-W12 but if we don't, we're moving to the area anyway. We both have great engineering jobs, but we're tired of working for other people. One thing I would recommend is to make sure you have a strong co-founder who is as interested in it as you are. This is very important because it seems that everyone other than your co-founder will just think you're crazy and having some support is pretty critical to your sanity.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm doing this right now. The best advice I have is: Know what your costs are, and know how to make enough money to cover them.

Savings will last a finite amount of time, so you need to figure out how to replenish in order to give yourself some runway.

If you already have this plan in place then the next thing you should be working on is increasing customer acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER5> Get paying customers or written commitments from a good amount of customers to validate your business model. Otherwise you may find yourself without a job, and a product no one wants to buy.

If no one will give you money or written commitment, but say that they will buy, they aren't a customer. It's their polite/non-confrontational way of saying no

</comment><comment><USER6> Forgot to do?

a. Beg for my job back b. Find customers & build company c. then quit

Not being glib, I just subscribe to being careful while reaching for the gold ring! Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> Customers are oxygen. Without them, you will die.

</comment><comment><USER8> Coming from a single founder almost a year in: Get a Co-Founder. You will have probably more than double the output, someone to bounce ideas off of, and a more sane life.</comment>


Opera Ice – New Smartphone Browser from Opera Software - <AUTHOR> http://browserfame.com/1079/opera-ice

<comment><USER2> This is a sad day, although probably inevitable. This is the beginning of the end for Presto. I put years of my life into that engine. A fool's errand, of course, since we were completely outgunned and outmanned by the competition.

I'm glad I jumped ship when I did. But it was a fun ride.

<comment><USER3> > since we were completely outgunned and outmanned by the competition

I wouldn't be so sure about that:

<http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html#fsCanvas>

Opera has always been outmanned and yet consistently been close to or ahead of the curve.

I would say this is more about arbitrary and unhelpful platform restrictions and Opera being characteristically pragmatic about that (lawsuits notwithstanding).

Going forward, are Microsoft and Opera now _both_ to be contributors to the WebKit project? :)

<comment><USER2> > Opera has always been outmanned and yet consistently been close to or ahead > of the curve.

No, not the last three or four years.

Although Opera has been doing great in minor areas due to the sheer brilliance of individual engineers, the topic of every single roadmap meeting in the Core department has been "How can we catch up to the competition? Which missing feature hurts the most right now?".

Given the resource constraints, they've done _great_. But it's not sustainable. When I left a year ago, there were about 60 developers and 30 testers working on the actual engine, supported by a pitiful array of hardware. Upper management could have played their cards differently five years ago, but now it's too late.

(I used to be core test manager of this fine organization.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a very cool app, simply because it eliminates most of the browser chrome. Taking out browser chrome is a very important step for making web apps first class citizens. It might be a minor visual difference, but it's a huge psychological one.

On another note, it sounds like Opera was forced to use UIWebViews due to Apple's restrictions. I'm curious to know if anyone has ever hacked up another rendering engine (even WebKit) to run on iOS. Obviously it wouldn't be able to make it on the app store, but it would be cool to play around with on a development device!

</comment><comment><USER5> I love Opera Mobile on Android, so them making advances makes me happy.

Although other Android browsers might be slightly faster and have a more native look and feel (hello Chrome), Opera Mobile has the most impressive Text wrapping (text reflow) feature of all the browsers. For me that is one of the single most important features in a mobile browser as much of the time browsing is spent with websites that are not mobile friendly.

I can't believe the other browser vendors haven't worked harder to achieve better text reflow results.

</comment><comment><USER6> I read the article and whilst it claims Opera are going to be using webkit the cnet article it references indirectly ([http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20121236-264/hybrid- browse...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20121236-264/hybrid-browser-to- lead-operas-android-charge-exclusive/)) does not mention webkit or the lack of presto.

I don't understand why Ice implies webkit, it could be presto like Opera Mini/Mobile (rendered on server).

<comment><USER7> Opera mobile doesn't render on the server, just Opera mini.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love using Opera Mobile on my Kindle Fire. It's a fantastic experience and I can watch any flash content I want!

Seeing it move from Presto to Webkit kind of makes me nervous though. Is Webkit an open standard or it controlled by Google (a single entity?).

Competition is good and I would love to see Opera flourish like that.

The swipe features looks gorgeous.

<comment><USER9> WebKit was initially developed (as a fork of KHTML) by Apple, not Google. It is open source, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My guess is that they are only using webkit on iOS devices where they are unable to use their own rendering engine. I can't see them throwing away Presto.

<comment><USER11> Opera Mini in iOS does the rendering in Opera servers and does not use webkit.

Most websites look way different in Opera Mini in iOS compared with Safari or Chrome for iOS (which uses UIWebView's).

Edit: I just thought maybe you meant Opera Mobile (not Mini) who is not out for iOS yet I think

<comment><USER12> I was under the impression that Opera Mini iOS uses the Opera servers to transmogrify pages into a simpler form, but that UIWebView is still used to present this simpler form.

<comment><USER13> It isn't. It uses a compact Opera-developed engine which interprets the binary markup language coming from the Opera Mini servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The invisible UI is such a wonderful and logical pattern, especially when constrained by a mobile platform. As touch interfaces reach maturity and users are more comfortable with the general paradigm, I think we'll be seeing a lot more applications forgo chrome in favor of an experience that relies on touch but is largely invisible to the user.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great news! Glad to see Opera adopting webkit, since many mobile html5 frameworks use webkit features that Opera Mini/Mobile wasn't able to use. That way we can get full compatibility with the mobile web and get to use Opera Link and Opera Turbo.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure Turbo would be available on the Webkit version. It seems like a feature quite deeply integrated into the engine.

<comment><USER17> Isn't enabling Turbo just saying "now the content will run through our servers and be compressed"? Amazon's Silk browser can switch between the 2 modes, too, as far as I know, although it uses the server compression by default.

<comment><USER18> The website is sent to Opera's servers to be compressed into opera binary markup language, not gzipped html. Probably presto-specific.

<comment><USER13> If Presto can convert pages to the binary markup language, why can't WebKit?

<comment><USER16> It can, of course, if you put in the work to make it do so. Presto already has had that work done. I'm not sure doing the work for Webkit would be worth the reward, especially considering they wouldn't be in control of iOS Webkit (controlled exclusively by Apple) including their changes. But that's just idle guesswork based on a subjective view of costs and benefits involved.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fourteen years after launching, 1Password raises a $200M Series A - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/14/fourteen-years-after-launching-1password-takes-first-funding-a-200m-series-a/ <comment><USER2> Earlier conversation: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535495)

<comment><USER3> Comments moved thither. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> I am so glad you used "thither". I feel like the `(th|h|wh)(ither|ence)` set of constructions is woefully underused in casual English.

<comment><USER3> I've been waiting for someone to notice :)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20thither&sort=byDate&type=comment)

Agreed about whence and hence and the others.

<comment><USER2> Fighting the good fight, eh?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Winklevoss Twins Say Increased Regulation Is Bullish for Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-07/winklevoss-twins-say-increased-regulation-is-bullish-for-bitcoin <comment><USER2> Only thing that stood in bitcoins path was transaction speeds, people moved to other crypto currency because it was easier to trade.

The ease of use issue will be addressed, and regulation for banks, and it will moste likely take off. Like ripple, banks are already using it to keep large transfer fees low.

The over price bubble will even out, doesn't mean crypto is going away.</comment>


Why Internet Explorer will survive and Firefox won't - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/why-internet-explorer-will-survive-and-firefox-wont/3064 <comment><USER2> _Internet Explorer will still be around in five years when Firefox will have, at best, a loyal cult following_

I think the one thing the article misses is that a good deal of that cult following are web developers who in the end set the tempo of what is adopted and what is not. If Firefox had not been so much better at helping web developers it would have never seen the surge in popularity that it has. They where also instrumental in fighting the HTML 5 video fight.

Some times it's not the numbers but the quality of those numbers. Chrome has shaved off some web developers for sure but I think it is safe to say that the lions share of developers still use FF as their primary browser, with the others using Chrome and a few using Opera and I don't see that trend changing unless someone just pulls so far ahead that it becomes more painful to develop with FF.

<comment><USER3> ... because the dearth of web developers using IE* led to few consumers using it. Right.

<comment><USER2> Actually yes when IE hit 4 a good deal of web developers favored it over Netscape, I remember the shift well.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: An Easy Library for GPGPU in JavaScript (Mobile and Web) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/turbo/js <comment><USER2> Does this actually do anything useful on iOS?

I went to the URL in question and it didn't seem to do anything.</comment>


Whe Power users are going to be the 80 percent - <AUTHOR> http://christophh.net/2011/11/04/we-are-going-to-be-the-80-percent/

<comment><USER2> I disagree with his quote that 80% of people use computers for only web browsing, email,simple office work and to hear music and see videos. I don't know anybody for whom that is true.

80% of people use computers to do those things and one more little thing not covered on that list. And that one more thing is different for all of them. For some it's plotting courses for their next sailing trip, for some it's designing sewing patterns, for others it's some heavy obscure spreadsheet calculations or checking building plans in their GIS software and so forth and so on. Basically a tablet that only let you do web browsing, email,simple office work and hear music and see videos won't replace a computer for anybody.

See also <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> First, a tablet doesn't let you just do those things.

I made the "80%" up, but the list should only capture what most of the people most of the time do with their computers. If you want to do the one more thing, there will always be more software for that, also for your tablet.

My point is that Tablets are the new _personal_ computer and what we knew as PC before is now going to be the _workstation_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, you can't do complex office tasks on tablets yet, I think. Anything that requires you to input a lot of text input still can't be done well on tablets. That includes any serious amount of writing.

Unless someone here already does their writing on tablets...

<comment><USER4> The iPad has Numbers and Pages for office software. It's written with the iPad in mind and allows for a great deal productivity.

<comment><USER3> Really. So you can write academic material on it, with the inclusion of bibliographic information? You can outline a novel and write it? You can create process documentation and tie it with graphing tools and charts and spreadsheets and tables?

Because I don't think your definition of "great deal of productivity" jives with mine...</comment></comment></comment>


Chaining USB drives - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/23/modular-usb-flash-drive-concept-offers-a-new-way-to-sort-your-da/ <comment><USER2> How would files on different segments be presented to the OS? Would the directories on each disk be merged together into one root directory, would each one get its own directory, or something else? To make the "just pull out the one with the vacation photos on it" use-case work, you would have to be able to see and control which segment a given file is on.

<comment><USER3> > Would the directories on each disk be merged together into one root > directory, would each one get its own directory, or something else?

Due to the way most modern filesystems (including all filesystems that windows supports) work, the only clean way to implement this is to have each segment appear as a separate drive. The operating system only sees the drive as a block-level device, so the drive doesn't know anything about folders or files. It just sees binary data.

You could implement a virtual block-level device on the device, and read files from that to write to each segment, but that would be a major performace hit, and push the cost up significantly as each segment would need a processor and a few megabytes of ram.

The only other way I can think of would be a custom driver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A solution looking for a problem. My regular machine is a MBP, so I'm no stranger to the "damn I wish I had more USB ports" problem.

But I have never, ever, _ever_ , thought "dammit! If only I could plug more USB memory sticks into this infernal machine!"

In fact, the only time I'm ever using a USB stick is to sneaknet some files to someone else (because in the year 2011 we have yet to figure out quick, painless filesharing with people you're physically near by. though Dropbox is starting to get ubiquitous enough...), and that hardly requires more than one USB port.

<comment><USER5> Complete tangent, but:

You can share files with Dropbox without the reciever having a n account, and as far as I can tell without installing software on either computer. Just login to dropbox.com, upload, and move the file to a public folder.

I really wish I understood why people don't do this generally, it's quite painless if you have an account already.

<comment><USER4> For small files when you're working with someone it's easy. For large files though it's a pain - you have to wait for it to upload from your end, and then for it to down on their end.

This is pretty annoying if they're sitting 10 feet away, and you can get it done faster if you just pull out a USB stick and do it that way.

There really needs to be a solid way to share P2P with someone on the same network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't see this as useful. Using USB drives to share pictures with friends was never popular, and with social networking is utterly dead. Sharing of larger files is already marginalized by the likes of dropbox and upload sites, and becoming more so over time.

USB flash drives aren't used for everything anymore. I don't know anyone who regularly uses one and would find it acceptable for the only thing holding 3/4 of the drive to their person to be the static friction of one USB plug, which is the only thing holding one of these combo drives together. If you're using a flash drive for a file today, chances are the file is too essential or too sensitive to depend on one of those plugs never coming undone, over a multi- year daily use lifespan.

</comment><comment><USER7> And what about chaining USB servers?

[http://blog.laptopmag.com/usb-stick-contains-dual-core- compu...](http://blog.laptopmag.com/usb-stick-contains-dual-core-computer- turns-any-screen-into-an-android-station)

</comment><comment><USER8> What a simple/awesome idea... I'm surprised nobody else has thought of this before!

<comment><USER9> For it to work, each of the drives would have to be both a mass storage device and a USB hub. Can USB hubs be this small? If each segment has to be 3 inches long to accomodate the dual functionality, a foot long chain of USB drives sticking out the side of your laptop is a bit less elegant than the concept.

<comment><USER10> There's also the problem of power. I doubt these devices could be usb spec compliant since what is essentially happening here is an endless chain of bus powered usb hubs.

It is pretty though.

<comment><USER11> It's not even the first time it was "dreamed" by some designer, with no technical consideration. You cannot actually do that in a standard way. Dan has a nice article on this: [http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2010/03/23/for- suitably-small-v...](http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2010/03/23/for-suitably- small-values-of-infinite/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is that a terabyte, or are you just happy to see me?</comment>


What is the technology stack behind Vine (video app)? [Quora] - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Vine-video-app/What-is-the-technology-stack-behind-Vine-video-app#ans3366046

<comment><USER2> Quora links don't get much traction on Hacker News, and will get a lot less if you don't include ?share=1 at the end of the URL -- this will at least remove the standard "create an account" call to action and allow people to see other content on the page.</comment>


How We Achieved 40K QPS and 20B Rows of Data in a Single Scale-Out Cluster - <AUTHOR> https://pingcap.com/success-stories/lesson-learned-from-40-k-qps-and-20-billion-rows-of-data-in-a-single-scale-out-cluster/ <comment><USER2> Calling cockroachdb "not open source" is a stretch.

[https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach)

(The title is also wildly inaccurate to what's in the article, and should just have the articles title)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the comment! CockroachDB is now under BSL and CCL licenses. Different users have different opinions but you are right, we need to be accurate about it. Please give me some time to consult our user and see whether we can update this case study.

<comment><USER3> This case study has been updated: [https://pingcap.com/success-stories/why-we- chose-tidb-over-o...](https://pingcap.com/success-stories/why-we-chose-tidb- over-other-mysql-based-and-newsql-storage-solutions/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice article, I just wish they went into more detail as to why TiKV was chosen over other distributed stores like: Cockroach, Yugabyte, or Foundation. It'd also be nice to know the size of those 40bn rows is it 10TB or 100TB?

<comment><USER5> For database selection, there is a blog post about why choose TiDB over CockroachDB and other MySQL-based solutions: [https://pingcap.com/success- stories/why-we-chose-a-distribut...](https://pingcap.com/success-stories/why- we-chose-a-distributed-sql-database-alongside-mysql-to-break-down-data-silos/)

<comment><USER6> It's interesting to see how crazy complex some of these scale-out solutions end up being, especially when they start off with something like MySQL and are forced to maintain compatibility while scaling far beyond what it was designed to do.

You've got to wonder if simply sharding by either player or game would have worked well enough, even with MySQL. Worked well enough for Blizzard for over a decade!

Similarly, I wonder if a single active write server paired with a handful of readable secondaries could have taken this query volume in its stride if using something like MS SQL Server on high-spec bare metal kit. Think In-Memory processing on dual AMD EPYC 2 servers with 128 cores per box.

They mention billions of rows and terabytes of data, but I've heard of similar scale systems as far back as over decade ago! The Australian phone company Telstra did all their billing in a single IBM DB2 database, for example, and the incoming data in that system is just as real time.

I'm probably wrong, but this smells like the company missed some basic optimisation opportunities somewhere...

<comment><USER7> > You've got to wonder if simply sharding by either player or game would have > worked well enough, even with MySQL. Worked well enough for Blizzard for > over a decade!

With all the respect I have for blizzard, I would not take old Blizzard as an example of scalability handling. I remember a time where there authentication system was well known to give up under load after every update.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pingcap is loosing hundreds and thousands of potential customers and millions of dollars by not having a single-binary product. The current setup is over- complicated and confusing and I would not touch it with a 10ft pole, as they say. That's why it's worth rewriting the app from mysql syntax to postgre syntax and use cockroachdb more than spending dev _, ops_ , cloud* hours on making legacy code work with this thing. But they'll never learn. It's not like this thing came out just yesterday. I have been keeping my eye on this since it came out and I think it is maybe even superior product to cdb and possibly the best in the category, but again, i am getting head-ache just looking at the setup docs.

<comment><USER9> PingCAP CTO here, thanks for these comments! We highly appreciate all the feedback!

First, it's true that the current setup/deployment of TiDB is not easy. This is something that we're making serious moves to improve. For example,

A. We provide Ansible playbooks to simplify the deployment and rolling upgrade for on-prem users;

B. We built and open-sourced TiDB Operator ([https://github.com/pingcap/tidb- operator](https://github.com/pingcap/tidb-operator)) to enable TiDB on Kubernetes. We are working on a fully managed service in the public cloud (coming soon). Whether it is one binary or multiple binaries, it'll be all transparent at the user level;

C. We are improving the default or self-adaptative parameters and are continuously refining the configuration process;

D. We are also trying to reduce the number of components. For example, the new version of CDC is implemented directly inside TiKV.

E. We are developing TiOps tools in a single binary to improve the operating and maintaining experience of the cluster. A fair amount of customers around the world are using TiDB in their production environments and we are making sure they get our help when needed in the setup so it would not be a deal- breaker.

Second, TiDB's multiple-component or highly-layered architecture is challenging for deployment but the benefits are also obvious:

A. The separation of the storage and computing layers makes it flexible and agile to scale/upgrade each layer as needed. Different layers need different types or different number of hardware resources. If the computing resources become the bottleneck, users can scale the SQL layer by adding more TiDB instances in real-time; if the bottleneck is the storage layer, they can easily add more TiKV instances to increase the storage capacity.

B. As is known to many that we have donated TiKV to CNCF last year. We are fully committed to the open-source community and would like to see TiKV be the building block and foundation of the next-generation infrastructure. For example, we are happy to see some community users sit Redis on top of TiKV, and we ourselves built the TiSpark ([https://github.com/pingcap/tispark](https://github.com/pingcap/tispark)) connector to run Apache Spark on TiKV.

For more thoughts about this, please take a look at my blog: [https://pingcap.com/blog/9-whys-to-ask-when-evaluating-a- dis...](https://pingcap.com/blog/9-whys-to-ask-when-evaluating-a-distributed- database/#2-why-separate-sql-from-storage)

Feel free to give more feedback on [https://github.com/pingcap/tidb](https://github.com/pingcap/tidb) and our community Slack channel [https://pingcap.com/tidbslack](https://pingcap.com/tidbslack). We're glad to discuss more with you on this issue!

<comment><USER8> all those points sound more like quickfixes for bad architecture design. I've been there, done that.. and i've learnt from it. instead of fixing the initial problem, you are just throwing more code and complexity over it. which costs you money and time. i think you made a BIG mistake byt going polyglot and not sticking to single a language which now prevents you from merging the code into a single binary in cost-efficient way.

if you decide to go with the single binary approach, i am curious to see if you decide to go with Go or Rust :)

just fyi: cdb went with Go but their storage layer ended up being rewritten with C, so they too are not much different from you, with the exception of being able to run a single binary via Cgo which you cannot do with Rust.

<comment><USER10> > all those points sound more like quickfixes for bad architecture design.

As an on looker the architecture of TiDB is anything but bad. It doesn't fit into the "run one thing for everything" bucket of software because it's designed to be horizontally scalable. Every part of the design is scoped well enough to only do the bare minimum for it's goal. I have no doubt that internally at Google things like BigTable look very architecturally similar.

> Big mistake going polyglot.

Why? Because you can't make a single binary? That's not really a use case that makes sense for a cloud native DB. Everything is going to be a container anyway, so it doesn't matter what artifacts are included. Also the individual implementation layers of TiDB are individually useful (TiKV).

Making a single binary has no benifits unless you're running your hardware in a pet mentality which manually curated software. In this case a horizontally scalable db will not help you.

Also, providing an operator is a far cry from a "quick fix". I applaud them for doing this because it essentially removes the operation burden of running their DB.

<comment><USER8> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


jQuery Impromptu - <AUTHOR> http://guidesigner.net/collection-of-development/best-jquery-prompt-for-user-input-with-style-jquery-impromptu/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure it's such a good idea to mess with modal dialogue boxes. From a usability perspective, it makes it harder to navigate, because it redefines known metaphors. This is the same problem as when people use images instead of a `<button>` or `<submit>` element. From a technical perspective, it's a magnet for annoying interface bugs.

<comment><USER3> I really like being able to use Javascript's prompt() and alert() dialogs (when the case really calls for a popup, of course) for the reasons you describe. But it seems like some browser vendors are pushing to make them as cumbersome as possible. Internet Explorer, for instance, will alert the user with a security warning if you use prompt(), saying "This page wants to ask you for information from a script" or something like that. I've encountered quite a few people who think that's a bug in my site's code.

<comment><USER2> I know it isn't a direct answer to what you are asking for, but in general I think that modal interfaces should be used very sparingly, if at all. In most cases, you can construct the interface in a non-modal way, and you end up with a better user experience. It's not always easy, but I think it's usually the better solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not very well presented on the landing page but if you work through the examples (follow link) it shows up rather better.

Some nice ideas there.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not to hate on this guy's library, but...is there anything there that's not already implemented in jQuery UI?

Also, it would be a bit 'cleaner' for the dialog boxes with an input to have their own method, instead of having to pass HTML strings to the alert method.

</comment><comment><USER6> Without the guidesigner.net adstorm (and working examples): <http://trentrichardson.com/Impromptu/index.php>

</comment><comment><USER7> I know it's customizable, but: red as the default color for 'OK'?!</comment>


New solar cell material achieves almost 100% efficiency - <AUTHOR> http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-39807-113.html <comment><USER2> Damnit, journalism. How on earth did they get this:

"Researchers at Ohio State University have accidentally discovered a new solar cell material capable of absorbing all of the sun's visible light energy. The material is comprised of a hybrid of plastics, molybdenum and titanium. The team discovered it not only fluoresces (as most solar cells do), but also phosphoresces. Electrons in a phosphorescent state remain at a place where they can be "siphoned off" as electricity over 7 million times longer than those generated in a fluorescent state. This combination of materials also utilizes the entire visible spectrum of light energy, translating into a theoretical potential of almost 100% efficiency. Commercial products are still years away, but this foundational work may well pave the way for a truly renewable form of clean, global energy."

From this:

"Oligothiophenes incorporating MM quadruple bonds have been prepared from the reactions between Mo2(TiPB)4 (TiPB = 2,4,6-triisopropyl benzoate) and 3′,4′-dihexyl-2,2′-:5′,2″-terthiophene-5,5″-dicarboxylic acid. The oligomers of empirical formula Mo2(TiPB)2(O2C(Th)-C4(n-hexyl)2S-(Th)CO2) are soluble in THF and form thin films with spin-coating (Th = thiophene). The reactions between Mo2(TiPB)4 and 2-thienylcarboxylic acid (Th-H), 2,2′-bithiophene-5-carboxylic acid (BTh-H), and (2,2′:5′,2″-terthiophene)-5-carboxylic acid (TTh-H) yield compounds of formula trans-Mo2(TiPB)2L2, where L = Th, BTh, and TTh (the corresponding thienylcarboxylate), and these compounds are considered as models for the aforementioned oligomers. In all cases, the thienyl groups are substituted or coupled at the 2,5 positions. Based on the x-ray analysis, the molecular structure of trans-Mo2(TiPB)2(BTh)2 reveals an extended Lπ-M2δ-Lπ conjugation. Calculations of the electronic structures on model compounds, in which the TiPB are substituted by formate ligands, reveal that the HOMO is mainly attributed to the M2δ orbital, which is stabilized by back-bonding to one of the thienylcarboxylate π * combinations, and the LUMO is an in-phase combination of the thienylcarboxylate π * orbitals. The compounds and the oligomers are intensely colored due to M2δ–thienyl carboxylate π * charge transfer transitions that fall in the visible region of the spectrum. For the molybdenum complexes and their oligomers, the photophysical properties have been studied by steady-state absorption spectroscopy and emission spectroscopy, together with time-resolved emission and transient absorption for the determination of relaxation dynamics. Remarkably, THF solutions the molybdenum complexes show room-temperature dual emission, fluorescence and phosphorescence, originating mainly from 1MLCT and 3MM(δδ* ) states, respectively. With increasing number of thienyl rings from 1 to 3, the observed lifetimes of the 1MLCT state increase from 4 to 12 ps, while the phosphorescence lifetimes are ≈80 μs. The oligomers show similar photophysical properties as the corresponding monomers in THF but have notably longer-lived triplet states, ≈200 μs in thin films. These results, when compared with metallated oligothiophenes of the later transition elements, reveal that M2δ–thienyl π conjugation leads to a very small energy gap between the1MLCT and 3MLCT states of <0.6 eV."

<http://www.pnas.org/content/105/40/15247.short>

The discovery of phosphorescent dual emission is a striking and important one, but there are dozens of hurdles still to create a solar cell, any one of which might be a nail in the coffin for the material. For example, just because some of the electrons end up in a triplet state doesn't mean all of them will: they've measured the singlet states as rapidly decaying, and therefore they'll have essentially the same trouble will harvesting them as other photovoltaics have. Furthermore, one won't be able to harvest all the energy from the visible spectrum even in principle: at a high level because of the second law of thermodynamics, and in the specific because the material will radiate as well.</comment>


Twillage helps you find local events from twitter - <AUTHOR> http://twillage.com We just opened Twillage, an event aggregator that mines twitter for local events and groups them by date and location. Let us know what you think. firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><AUTHOR> twillage now has fulltext search, e.g. find concerts in San Francisco: <http://twillage.com/search?q=concert+san+francisco>

<comment><AUTHOR> it's actually [http://twillage.com/search?q=concert&city=san+francisco&...](http://twillage.com/search?q=concert&city=san+francisco&state=ca)</comment></comment>


Eschewing Zshell for Emacs Shell - <AUTHOR> http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/eshell-fun.html <comment><USER2> Another thing that's really nice about Eshell is that it has TRAMP integration. You can just `cat /ssh:remote:~/foo.log` and it will transparently spawn an SSH session, run the command on the remote, and print the output.

It's a little like translators on the Hurd.

I don't use Eshell that much anymore (I got used to `M-x shell`), but it really is nice. The only drawback is that everything must go through Emacs buffers, so in some cases performance isn't great.

<comment><USER3> Err, i may be missing something, but you can do this with ssh anyway:

ssh host cat foo.log

<comment><USER4> Then here is a better example:

$ find-file /ssh:firstname.lastname@example.com:/opt/myfile.txt

Emacs will open the remote file in a buffer local to your Emacs and you can edit it as though it were a local file. When you save it's saved remotely, etc.

<comment><USER2> Hey mickey, thanks for "Mastering Emacs"! I'm glad I bought it. I recommend it to everyone having trouble making themselves comfortable in Emacs.

<comment><USER5> Completely agree! It came out just after I decided to ditch vim and use emacs. This book has helped me a whole lot with understanding emacs.

Thank you vey much for this book Mickey!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I tried to give it a go once and I remember constantly hitting small problems and after two days spent on fighting I went back to zsh.

The most annoying problem I couldn't find a solution for was lack of ability to open majority of applications in terminal - e.g. postgress shell.

Solution I am using nowadays is:

1\. Zsh->Emacs shell macro to open file in emacs using emacsclient.

2\. Emacs->Zsh by emacs function generating "cd" command to the folder of current file and adding it to my clipboard.

<comment><USER7> If you add binaries like psql, that need to control the terminal, to `eshell- visual-commands', Emacs will give them their own ansi-term buffers when you start them in eshell. `eshell-visual-subcommands' does the same for e.g. git log (but try Magit, too!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Speaking of cross-platform alternatives to traditional Unix shells, if you like Python try [http://xon.sh](http://xon.sh) . More compatible and overall usable as a shell than IPython.

<comment><USER9> I use this both on my work machine (Windows) and on my Linux box.

On Windows, it's great - if you don't want to learn Powershell. I get bash like behavior and can easily write custom "shell" scripts.

On Linux - not so great. Borderline frustrating to be honest. Some of the issues I have:

If I open something using nano, pressing ^X doesn't work as expected. Similar problems with other terminal software: I think some keybinding in less didn't work as well.

Midnight commander takes a long time to load. Randomly, in Midnight commander I cannot click on things.

Actually, this ability to click and select text in my console randomly goes away with Xonsh. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

A few other quirks I don't remember.

I tried different terminal software and the problems were in all of them.

I haven't yet reported these to the team. I do hope they can fix them. It is otherwise a great shell.

<comment><USER10> I have a couple similar ones too. Except I can't even start nano, it automatically gets sighup or something I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Jokingly, why not just boot into Emacs?

[https://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode- linux...](https://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html)

<comment><USER12> I know somebody who does this unironically.

<comment><USER13> get him to do a screencast, or many screencasts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Eshell was what brought me to Emacs in the first place, as it is a shell that works the same way on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and thereby saved my sanity.

<comment><USER15> Do you mean, more than e.g. bash compiled for Windows? I used that (msys?) bash for a few years on Windows and it was... well it was bash. It comes with standard Git for Windows install.

Or is there more to it?

<comment><USER14> Bash on Windows is like using a flightstick in a car. It sure works, but they weren't built for each other. Eshell is just Emacs, and Emacs doesn't make much of a difference between OSes.

The point is, Emacs comes with a lot of tools that would normally be executables called by the shell (unavailable on Windows) and deals with paths in a consistent way.

Besides, this was before git came with git bash on Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How come emacs shell still does not support input redirection? You have to do

        cat file | program

instead of

        program < file

</comment><comment><USER17> There is something wrong with the `eshell/x` function, if start `Ctrl-!` in _scratch_ buffer, after execute `x` in eshell prompt, there will `Wrong type argument: integer-or-marker-p, nil x` in _scratch_ buffer; if I start `Ctrl-!` in init.el, there will be `Marker points into wrong buffer: #<marker at 955 in scratch> x` in my init.el file.

<comment><USER18> This works for me:

      (defun eshell/x ()
          (interactive)
          (insert "exit")
          (eshell-send-input)
          (delete-window))

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I tried this for a couple of years but have since returned to iTerm/Bash. When live tailing logs in production, the Emacs renderer is just too slow.

<comment><USER20> Have you tried auto-revert-tail-mode?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> wonderful, eshell is a nice shellish emacs tool, makes me want to go further but so far it's very potent as is. another johnw gem

</comment><comment><USER21> How does Eshell handle my Bash aliases & functions ?

<comment><USER18> There's a slightly different syntax, but there are some hacks around this. See [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EshellAlias](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EshellAlias) for details</comment></comment>


Georgia Governor Vetoes Short-Sighted Computer Crime Bill - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/victory-georgia-governor-vetoes-short-sighted-computer-crime-law <comment><USER2> For anyone else confused by the title, "Victory" should be "Victory!"

<comment><USER3> We took the victory bit out of the title altogether.</comment></comment>


Meet the Man Building Elon Musk's 760MPH Hyperloop: Interview with Dirk Ahlborn - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/reasontv/2015/04/07/the-man-whos-building-760mph-hyperloop

<comment><USER2> Whats incredible about this is that they are taking such a futuristic and ambitious project and not scaling it back or making it more realistic. They keep pushing the boundaries on what they can accomplish with it. I hope they'll be able to achieve everything they set out to do.</comment>


A Proper Server Naming Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codeship.com/proper-server-naming-scheme/ <comment><USER2> Original article : [http://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming- scheme/](http://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/)

Which was posted here before : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8010247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8010247)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, good catch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They get everything right but still include the nonsense names.

You can tell the experience level of an infrastructure based on whether they use Lord of the Rings references or not.</comment>


10 Reasons the Age of Finite State Machines is Over - <AUTHOR> http://aigamedev.com/questions/fsm-age-is-over

<comment><USER2> Better title: "10 Reasons the Age of Finite State Machines for a very small niche of the computing domain is Over"

<comment><AUTHOR> I was about to add "(for game development)", but I thought: 1) that was clear as soon as you started reading the article; 2) most reasons were probably also applicable to other areas as well</comment></comment>


The End of Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/2008/12/04/the-end-of-wikipedia/

<comment><USER2> The headline is absolutely misleading, but maybe the author thought "Wikipedia to Redesign Wiki-edit Page" wouldn't sound as interesting. Basically, Wikipedia wants to make it simpler for people to edit the wiki. The author's insightful commentary can be summed up as "Maybe you will think this is good a good thing, maybe you won't. I don't know."

This article is simply terrible and to be honest, I've never read a good article from thenextweb.com.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a dumb article. Please don't post this kind of crap to HN.

</comment><comment><USER4> How about: The End of Sensationalist Headlines?

</comment><comment><USER5> speak softly and carry a big stick

in this case, the 'flag' utility is the stick

</comment><comment><USER6> You mean "the end of thinking out loud?"</comment>


Dell updates popular XPS 13 laptop with 16:10 screen, IR camera - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/dell-updates-xps-13-laptop-with-1610-aspect-ratio-screen-ir-camera/ <comment><USER2> I love the 16:10 ratio screen but a bit disappointed that the page-up and page-down keys are still squashed above the left and right arrow keys. I have used the XPS 13 for about 6 months and just cannot avoid hitting the pg-up or pg-down keys when reaching for the arrow keys which is a nightmare for coding. I would much rather have those as function keys as they were on the previous model of the XPS 13.

When I looked into this issue, I found an old thread on a Dell forum where an XPS 13 user (of a previous model) was complaining that there were no dedicated page-up and down keys. As someone that uses those keys a lot I get that it seems Dell's solution to this has caused them to sabotage the functionality of the arrow keys and is definitely worse than having no dedicated keys for pg-up and down. I was hoping they would hear feedback from developers or anyone who uses arrow keys a lot and revert back to the old layout.

<comment><USER3> We've heard your complaints, and now those keys are backspace and forward delete.

<comment><USER2> Wait is this a joke or is it real? I've actually gone and taken another look and now I can't tell what the actual new layout of the keyboard is. I can't find any examples of photos of the latest model with a UK layout.

Edit turns out I was wrong and now the pg-up and pg-down keys _are_ function keys again but the left and right keys are now full-size. From what I've heard from MacBook users, they prefer the inverted T layout that Apple went with with their latest 16" laptop as it's easier to find the arrow keys by feel. Oh well I guess it's still a big improvement from last year's design.

<comment><USER4> It's really funny how PC OEMs copied the broken Apple arrow-key layout from 2016-18...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a 13" XPS and a 15" Macbook Pro. I wanted to like the XPS but the Mac is just much better hardware. First, there is no comparison between the quality of the touchpads. The MacBook one works great but the XPS is terrible (imprecise movement, accidental movement/clicks from palm). The XPS wifi card is unreliable, it frequently disconnects. I understand a lot of people replace it with a better one. The screen is not great. There is no way to disable the automatic brightness magic going on (terrible for doing photograph processing). There is no way to turn of the eye blinding charge light on the front, under the touchpad. For a laptop that is premium priced, I'm disappointed with the hardware quality. I prefer my Lenovo X230 over the XPS 13.

<comment><USER6> One issue with Windows laptops on WiFi that annoys me is that they aren't well-tuned to transfer from one access point to another. For example at work I will often have to disconnect from the network and reconnect to get my laptop to snap to a nearby access point. Otherwise it stays connected to a far away point but with weaker connection indicated (by the bars). This never seems to be an issue with iOS/MacOS devices.

<comment><USER7> Maybe Macs have gotten better, but on my MBP 2015 it would never switch seamlessly from one AP to another when moving around the office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 1e-9 The ars technica writeup does not mention the most significant upgrade of all in my opinion: 32GB RAM in February. See [https://bartongeorge.io/2020/01/01/introducing- the-2020-xps-...](https://bartongeorge.io/2020/01/01/introducing- the-2020-xps-13-developer-edition-this-one-goes-to-32/)

</comment><comment><USER8> That's awesome. 16:9 monitors only make sense for watching video, and are an abomination for pretty much any kind of work involving text.

I will be very happy when 4k 16:10 or 3:2 desktop monitors become widely available at an affordable price.

<comment><USER9> Microsoft's Surface has the perfect aspect ratio for screens (3:2), imo. Wide screen devices just look wrong. 16:10 is fine, but it still isn't quite right (this is also what Apple uses.)

<comment><USER10> I very reluctantly gave up my Thinkpad Yoga 2 for a new Surfacebook instead of sticking with Lenovo but I have no regretted the switch yet. Any chance you can recommend a USB C hub that retains a USB-C plug on it that will do DisplayPort out? I have a nice Anker USB-C hub but it only gives me HDMI out and even though it retains a USB-C plug on it it downgrades it to USB 3.0.

<comment><USER11> There's two Lenovo docks that do this. One has an integrated GPU that I guess you can use if you have thunderbolt, one doesn't. Both provide plenty of displayport/hdmi out.

I think this was it: [https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad- Thunderbolt-40AN0135U...](https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad- Thunderbolt-40AN0135US- Capability/dp/B07M6S81CM/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=lenovo+dock&qid=1578085392&s=electronics&sr=1-4)

I bought one to use with my HP work laptop at home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does any Dell employee lurking have info about why I should consider waiting for the developers edition rather than just load up my favorite distro on the consumer hardware?

<comment><USER13> The reason to get the Developer Edition is to endorse OEM Linux support

<comment><USER14> Further to that Dell will also have configured it with Linux compatible hardware with solid driver support.

For example, the WiFi and Bluetooth support in dev edition XPS13 is solid.

You're also paying for OEM firmware updates. I've had several over the life of my XPS13 even though it's no longer the current model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks nice, I'm torn about what my next laptop should be, but at this point whoever can offer me the most for 1k and I want 16GB of RAM minimum, if that's not possible, I'm holding back. I'm sick of paying ridiculous money for basically the same maximum RAM we've been able to buy for a decade (A 2010 MBP could hold 16GB of RAM, sure it's not DDR4 or better, but it's still useful and runs just fine).

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I replaced my wife's marginally upgraded 2011 MacBook Air recently with the 2019 MacBook Air because I got tired of looking at that shitty TN panel on the old Air.

8 years later and the base model $1100 MacBook still has 8GB of ram and 256GB of storage, just like the 2011 MacBook Air I wanted to replace.

What the fuck happened?

<comment><USER15> Meanwhile I can get a decent tower that costs about the base price of a Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM, a decent SSD, and so on, can play GTA5 and the new Tomb Raider (a buddy of mine built a rig for like under $400 and benchmarked with those games and was surprised).

<comment><USER16> Yeah, the HP Envy 13 I use has a sharper display, a 1TB SSD, and 16GB of RAM, and twice as many cores for $100 cheaper than the 2019 MacBook Air.

It got crushed by an airline seat reclining but other than some slight warping it's fine, so the build quality is actually pretty decent on it.

The only things worse about the Envy are the tiny trackpad and the lack of OS X, but I prefer Ubuntu to OS X these days anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Dell estimates that this model will get up to 19 hours of battery life when configured with an FHD+ display."

I like this trend.

<comment><USER18> Up to means you don't really do anything and set the brightness low.

The trend is actually to have smaller batteries. So if you do anything that uses the cpu 19 hours can become 3 pretty quick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe one day, the chipset gods at Intel will see fit to bless us with a 13" ultrabook that has 32GB of RAM.

I can't tell if it's Intel restricting it, but it's suspicious to me that every manufacturer simultaneously agreed to not ship larger RAM configurations in this form factor.

<comment><USER19> The developer model has an option for 32gb!

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dell- XPS...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dell-XPS-13-DE- Icelake-2020)

EDIT: the 32gb model isn't available for sale until next month I think

<comment><USER16> Oh wow, so the arstechnica article is mistaken. This is great news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm hoping Thinkpad follows this lead and also moves to something not 16:9

<comment><USER7> Lenovo announced the X1 Carbon 2020 as well today, and it looks the same as the X1 Carbon 2019 and the X1 Carbon 2018. Max 16 GB RAM.

But hey, it has WiFi 6 now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Kind of annoying that you can't get it without the windows logo on the meta key when buying it with Linux.

<comment><USER22> I'm surprised Microsoft would let them use that logo on a product not sold with Windows.

<comment><USER23> They didn't two models ago and there was a special kernel hack/package installed specifically to keep the windows key from doing anything since there wasn't an accompanying license, it took less than a minute to remove but still annoying.

The last model didn't have that keyblock though so I guess they got over it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This may seem like a minor issue, but the downward firing speakers are a ridiculous choice for 2020. There are laptops that don't have compromises like these. Yes we can use headphones or pair an external bluetooth speaker, but sometimes it is nice to just have your laptop fill your hotel room with sound and you may not have these other accessories on hand.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't think there is anything particularly different about my development environment than others, but I really struggle with only 16gb of ram. As much as I like being mobile, my MBP is "light duty" at best (real work relegated to my iMac). Thus, disappointing to see the 16gb limit on these new Dell models.

<comment><USER25> What is your development environment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Are keyboards going to get so flat that at some point they are concave...

</comment><comment><USER27> What a disappointing review. Core count? RAM clock rates? I guess it's really an "enterprise" laptop for people who don't care much about things like that.

<comment><USER28> It's not a review. It's just a press release/advertisement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why would someone want an IR camera?

I can't find any information online about why that would be useful.

<comment><USER30> It's for Windows Hello (facial recognition login).</comment></comment>


FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/21/fcc_net_neutrality/ <comment><USER2> FYI:

The deadline for comments is March 30, and the deadline for reply comments is April 29, (though it's not clear what the difference between comments and reply comments is).

The FCC document (in all its legalistic glory) can be seen here: [1]

And you can comment here: [2]

[1] - [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-20-168A1.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-20-168A1.pdf)

[2] - [https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express](https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for that, my comment was:

 _Just as the commission has always held it was the responsibility and duty of all users of a particular part of the spectrum from intentionally or unintentionally interfering with any other legitimate users, the commission should make rulings that require that providers of Internet service (ISPs) shall not intentionally or unintentionally interfere with any legitimate use of the network bandwidth between the end user and the service provider communicating with that end user. Such policies of equal access for all legitimate uses has been a bedrock of FCC policy since the commission was established._

For people trying to fill out the form, use 17-108 as the proceeding you are commenting on.

<comment> angry-sw-dev Appreciate your posting the filing.

Keep in mind, what you post to FCC is public with your contact info. Posting it here verbatim creates a linkage between your persona here and IRL. You may not mind, but it's something to consider.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that train left the station a long long time ago. But it is good advice for people who haven't been on the net long enough. Another fun fact, get your HAM license and "whoops" they use your address as the station address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why won't the opponents of net neutrality do the same thing they did last time and just buy comments from ad-tech companies? Most comments last time (even the ones obviously programmatically added) were legit.

Shell companies were created, those companies would buy "leads" from ad-tech companies. Those "leads" were names/emails of people who checked a box saying "I'm okay if you use my name and email to comment on the net neutrality issue." There is no real way to tell where these leads come from. Theoretically the ad-tech companies will place ads on publisher websites which contain a checkbox allowing a user to "opt-in". Once the leads make it back to the shell companies, they can add those leads to the comments section because the person willingly (in theory) gave them their info for this exact purpose. In reality the ad-tech industry is rife with grey-hat SEO techniques at best, and outright fraud at worst.

<comment><USER5> Why would adtech companies buy anti-net-neutrality comments?

They are some of the biggest proponents of it because they don't want ISPs trying to charge them for transit to their users.

<comment><USER6> I believe the parent comment was saying that AdTech companies were _selling_ peoples' identities to use for fake comments on the FCC website (to, presumably, Comcast/Verizon/etc)

<comment><USER5> Hmm maybe you are right.

I'd like to see one of these checkboxes though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would introducing competition for internet access at the residential level help prevent the type of consumer abuse that was predicted to happen? If Comcast is my only choice for broadband and there is no net neutrality, they can set whatever terms they want. If I have a choice between Comcast, three LEO internet providers, and four fixed wireless providers, Comcast loses its leverage.

<comment><USER8> Creating traditional competition in local infrastructure is difficult if not impossible for several reasons

\- Last mile sections of the city will always have winner takes most (customers) situation, making the lines built by the other providers redundant and wasteful

\- There are only so many communication lines you can put on poles, and underground, before the people start complaining about ugliness, and never ending construction.

I think a good approach for local communication infrastructure is ownership by community/local-goverment and private contract bidding on construction, maintanance and support

\- Companies bid on building new infrastructure,

\- Companies bid on running & maintaining existing infrastructure (usually a 2-3 year bid contract that sets fixed rate for all customers for 2-3 years). At the end of each contract a new bid goes out, but the same company can "win" the bid

\- People in the community vote on the bids. The POLITICIANS don't get to pick the winning bid

<comment><USER9> A lot of people agree that the problems that net neutrality regulations try to solve are caused by local, unimpeachable telecom monopolies. The economics of having a bunch of competing infrastructure make no sense. As much as I generally dislike regulation, I welcomed Title II classification because regulations are an effective answer answer to an abusive monopoly.

However, I think another overall approach would be just as effective at achieving pro-consumer ISP behavior. The approach is simply this: via regulation, force local loop unbundling, and take no other action. Suddenly, anyone would be allowed to start an ISP and rent the existing infrastructure. This would reintroduce the free market and allow it to solve the underlying behavior problems. I think that when it came time to vote with their wallet, most people would select a pro-neutrality ISP, regardless of their political alignment. Competition generally works fine in places it's actually present.

Incumbent ISPs would complain and scream, possibly louder than they have against Title II. I don't know what the legal approach would be for forcing unbundling, but I seem to recall it wasn't completely infeasible.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. Local loop un-bundling does not solve the problem. You are still back to the same situation. A single pipe can only handle so many providers, thus limit local competition to 2 or 3 providers. So either all will collude, or the one with the deeper pockets will under-price the other ones until they go out of business. (sure you can add more "regulation", but this just throwing duct tape on a broken system)

Local infrastructure will always be a winner takes all economic game. So its pointless to play it. (side-note: Elon Musk's Starlink might change the economic game)

The only way for people to "vote with their wallets" on local communication infrastructure, is BEFORE the winner "settles in", not AFTER.

A bid system, allows 100's of companies to compete to set the price for 2-3 years. Rather than 2-3 companies competing to set the price for perpetuity. It also creates an incentive to produce quality service, because they will be competing for another contract in 2 to 3 years (i.e. they have 2-3 years to demonstrate they are a competent provider).

<comment><USER10> > A single pipe can only handle so many providers

A single pipe can handle only so many customers. I don't see how it limits the number of providers?

There actually are countriess with such rules, and they seem to work well. The difficult part is the need to set some uniform price providers must pay for that "last mile" connection to their customer. I seem to remember something like $8/month in Germany. That's actually low enough, it would allow healthy competition even if you set wholesale price 50% higher than neccessary.

The same mechanism is used for competition among power and natural gas companies.

<comment><USER8> I guess you are right. You can really put as many "providers" on a pipe as you want. But are they really providers from a competition standpoint, or just the same pipe with a different logo?

The problem is that they can't compete on price (in the downwards direction), and they can't compete on building new infra with latest technology. The minimum price is established by the price the owner of the pipes charges. Which is usually set by the gov't. So the can only compete on value added services (i.e. hey we are not going to sell your data hooray!)

The core competition we want in local infrastructure is faster internet and cheaper prices. I think the dual bid system can accomplish that (i.e. separate bids on building/upgrading infra, and bids on maintenance/support)

As for gas and electricity, I think a similar bid system would work as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's been over two years since Net Neutrality was repealed. I remember at the time there was a lot of talk about how the internet was going to be ruined by throttling, paid "fast lanes", etc.

Have any of these things happened? Or did that turn out to mostly be fear- mongering?

<comment><USER12> Fast lanes benefit established players at the expense of start ups. Consequently, if there has been detrimental effects, I doubt you would notice them.

When you think to yourself, why do I put up with youtube, why isn't there an alternative... that's the 'thing happening'.

<comment><USER13> Where are these fast lanes? I believe you of course, but how do I know these exist like you say?

<comment><USER14> Netflix is probably the most relatable case study on what fast lanes look like, because it is Netflix that pays whatever rate the teleco thinks it can insist on in order to install their CDN in your ISPs hub, that in many cases must compete with the exact same content the telco is now serving.

(Side note: one more good reason for Netflix to be in the content creation game)

Netflix gets to pay whatever rate to get priority infrastructure at the telco, you get to pay more to Netflix, and you blame Netflix (not the telco) if the content delivery is botched / not as good as what your "cable subscription over the Internet" delivery is.

That doesn't line up perfectly with the narrative about fast lanes that we were sold, but it does show some of the power being wielded by the telco today as more than just a dumb pipe, and how they leverage their position against competitors.

<comment><USER10> That's not a scenario net neutrality regulation would affect. Larger companies will always have more resources, and with that they will have opportunities to invest in infrastructure and improve service that smaller competitors cannot match. There's a continuum from "choosing a more expensive cloud provider" to CDNs to these edge caches.

<comment><USER14> > That's not a scenario net neutrality regulation would affect.

I'm not sure that's true. Netflix must _pay a premium to the ISP_ to get _prioritized access within the ISP_ in order to get their edge cache in position to _compete against the ISP_. That's three ways in which the ISP is not acting as a dumb pipe.

The Wikipedia understanding of network neutrality is: the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally, and not discriminate or charge differently based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just left my remarks. Here's what I wrote, just for the sake of public record (last time we played this game there was a lot of comments thrown out, unfairly).

The internet is a critical part of both military and civilian infrastructure and should not be monitored, limited, or in any way restricted by any entity. Under the definition of arms understood at the time of the Constitution (as written by James Madison in Federalist 46), the internet and any digital tools which may be used in the defense of the nation are "arms" and therefore protected by the second amendment.

Further, because the internet is ubiquitous in modern society as a means of communication, much more so than letters were at the time of the constitution, the government has no right whatsoever to restrict access or use of the internet. Even if there were a disagreement over this interpretation, there can be no doubt that the general public 'assembles' and 'petitions' using the internet. This petition itself is being written on the internet. All this ignores the simple truth that the internet is the most common means of distribution for the press worldwide.

Finally, because the federal government has singularly supported, with enormous sums of taxpayer dollars, the internet infrastructure which is now (against the interest of the public, for which the federal government is a trustee) owned by private corporations, all internet infrastructure should be treated as public property, and ISP's should act only in a capacity of providing a utility service.

In summary - there should be no privatization of internet infrastructure. There should be no government or corporation monitoring anyone's use of the internet (without a proper warrant, signed by a judge, on a case-by-case basis). A person's digital information should be treated as 'papers' and 'effects' as they are considered to be by the general public and by most experts in the subject. And lastly, there should be absolutely zero limits, restrictions, rationing, throttling, or other mitigation of any person's access to a completely free and open internet.

<comment><USER16> > Under the definition of arms understood at the time of the Constitution (as > written by James Madison in Federalist 46), the internet and any digital > tools which may be used in the defense of the nation are "arms" and > therefore protected by the second amendment.

I'm not sure about this. What about shovels, nuclear bombs, or meth [0]? Do we have a right to bear nukes?

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_culture_of_subst...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_culture_of_substituted_amphetamines#Military_use)

<comment><USER15> My personal stance on the 'right to bear nukes' question is that a weapon of mass destruction has no defensive utility and is either self-destructive or offensive by nature. Therefore, nukes would not be protected in the same way as precision munitions and firearms.

Amphetamines or other performance-enhancing drugs are absolutely useful for military applications. As much as I loathe drugs and addiction I don't believe I have the right to restrict what another human being can or cannot put into their body.

<comment><USER17> EU citizen here.

> My personal stance on the 'right to bear nukes' question is that a weapon of > mass destruction has no defensive utility and is either self-destructive or > offensive by nature.

Serious question: How is that different from munition and/or firearms?

As far as I know, if you exclude weapons whose utility is only self- destructive or offensive, you'll only have (active/passive) shielding left, which precise munitions and firearms to the best of my knowledge are not. Yes, they can be used as a threat, but the same can be said for nukes.

<comment><USER15> Essentially it boils down to this:

If someone breaks into your home, you can reliably combat the intruder with a firearm - without harming a bystander.

If someone is attacking your town or village, you can at least situationally combat them with precision-guided munitions without killing any civilians (not that they are used ethically in all cases, just speaking to their potential use).

Neither of those things is true of WMDs. You have to stretch the bounds of realism pretty far before you can find a way to deploy a nuke effectively without killing innocent people, or yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is my dead mother going to come back from the beyond again to give pro-isp propaganda?

<comment><USER19> Do you have a better option for the crooks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Recent interview with Ajit Pai covers some of his thoughts on net neutrality. I thought it was was worth a listen/read

[http://freakonomics.com/podcast/ajit- pai/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/ajit-pai/)

As for the article, I don't think it matters all that much except maybe possible slight embarassment?

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure I would agree that the article doesn't matter that much. It's an argument that while the FCC's going along with what the courts decided, they're not necessarily doing so in good faith because they tried to bury the announcement with fluff and didn't use a title that would be understandable to the average user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My opinion on this is really unpopular on HN, but I still hold it's the correct approach: Net Neutrality is a policy destined for continuous failure and we need to abandon it.

* Creating competition is the only surefire path for improvement

* State/Local governments should not subsidize players to avoid entrenching ISPs and creating local monopolies.

* In areas with entrenched ISPs, the only way to break the cycle is to bring in new players (Google Fiber successfully proved this)

The FTC should regulate ISPs, not the FCC:

* An "internet service" provides internet access unfiltered subject to a well defined classes. Anything that is not an ISP is an "information service" provides a narrow walled garden and must be advertised as such.

* ISPs should be regularly investigated for false claims on advertisement.

<comment><USER23> Google Fiber is essentially dead. It halted expansion in 2016 and has only supported its existing locations since then. Even for a company as rich as Google, it wasn't financially feasible for them. How are companies smaller than Google even supposed to compete?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I ran across an old article that might help you craft a comment. "How to write a meaningful FCC comment supporting net neutrality"[0]. I used several of the tips on there and I think my comment was pretty good.

[0] [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/saving-net- neutr...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/saving-net-neutrality- tips-for-writing-persuasive-comments-to-the-fcc/)

</comment><comment><USER25> > You are filing a document into an official FCC proceeding. All information > submitted, including names and addresses, will be publicly available via the > web.

Why do they need my address at all? And worse, why do they need to make the email and physical address public?

</comment><comment><USER26> Paid fast lanes are a bad idea, but I think 100% equality for all packets is just as bad or worse. Real time traffic should be prioritized over data transfers. Right now my video call gets clobbered when I download a file. It doesn't have to be like that.

<comment><USER27> How should your ISP know? Diffserv might help, but I doubt some shitty application will set them.

<comment><USER28> They can tell right now. T-Mobile gives free data usage for video and music streaming, for instance.

You can either do traffic pattern analysis or just base it on what IPs they are connecting to.

<comment><USER27> That is not independent and not net neutral.

<comment><USER26> It also doesn't cross the ISP boundary.

<comment><USER27> It probably doesn't need to, bottleneck is usually at the customers side. (Mainly due to bad upload)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Last time, Net Neutrality had clauses that would provide the government and corporations the ability to effectively establish a firewall that would Only Allow "Lawful internet traffic" and "Lawful applications, services or nom- harmful devices..."

previous Net Neutrality text:

> § 8.5 No blocking. A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet > access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block lawful > content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices, subject to > reasonable network management.

> § 8.7 No throttling. A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet > access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not impair or > degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of Internet content, > application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to > reasonable network management.

-

this is putting too much faith in the government (+corporations) and enables the lawful establishment of the Great American Firewall to manage what's "lawful"

<comment><USER30> It does no such thing. All ISPs and public wifi I have ever connected to have terms of service that prohibit illegal activities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sometimes I feel like the only tech nerd who doesn't support NN.

<comment><USER30> Why do you not support it?

<comment><USER31> It's been a while since I've looking into the subject, but from what I remember... the idea was that Telecom could sell slow-lane service at a discount. This would benefit people who would rather save money than purchase fast-lane service, which I imagine is more people than you'd think. If fast- lane public WiFi is available pretty much everywhere in town, and you're really trying to not spend money, then you might opt for slow-lane traffic at a discount at home and use public internet for you're more demanding transfers. Alternatively if you only want access to specific services and you can save money for doing so, then... same idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I must just live in a good area because I don't understand why people still rally around this. In the past 10 years my home internet speed has gone from 15mb to 200mb with Charter/Spectrum without me paying another dime. They keep sending me free modem upgrades and there's no fee attached. The service is good enough that I can stream 4 HD shows at the same time without an issue and internet based TV services are a viable option for people around the country. And I can do this without any noticeable drop off in work usage.

What is the expected gain from Net Neutrality at this point?

<comment><USER10> None of that has anything to do with NN.

NN is when you can't get to "Social Media Startup X" because _they_ didn't pay your ISP.

You are unlikely to even notice this, because only newcomers would be required to pay ransom. Blocking existing sites would lead to customer complaints and actual competition.

<comment><USER13> > NN is when you can't get to "Social Media Startup X" because they didn't pay > your ISP.

That sounds bad! Any examples of that ever happening before or after NN?

<comment><USER30> This is the case that first brought it to my attention:

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/08/fcc-rules-against- comc...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/08/fcc-rules-against-comcast-bit- torrent-blocking).

<comment><USER13> Ok, so YEARS before Net Neutrality and the FCC fined them for doing it.

So, in no way supportive of the NN argument.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>