Lavabit Defied FBI Demands to Turn Over Crypto Keys, Documents Show - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed/ <comment><USER2> If you want to support the Lavabit defense fund, you can do so here

[https://rally.org/lavabit](https://rally.org/lavabit)

EDIT: Since I posted the link 30 minutes ago, there is roughly $1200 more in fund and I'm guessing that it's mostly from HN. So keep it up.

<comment><USER3> How many of us want to help, but are afraid of the consequences?

<comment><USER4> I want to help, and am not afraid of the consequences. The government is not going to go after an individual for funding another's defense fund, and if they do, I guess I used my life for the right reasons.

<comment><USER5> Yay! That's the jrockway I remember! Just because of this comment, I'm tossing in $50.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I don't think I've ever donated to a legal defense fund, but this one seemed like a no-brainer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution)

"particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"

Clearly this is a violation of the 4th Amendment as such a key would give them the ability to conduct unfettered and "unparticular" searches. A more targeted, and constitutionally legal, approach would have been to order lavabit to use, but not disclose, the private key to decrypt specific emails from specific people. Given that the police know the public key, they could verify that lavabit had supplied correct decryptions.

<comment><USER7> Hmm.. the FBI had probable cause to believe Snowden's email contained incriminating data. Furthermore, targeted pen registers/trace orders aren't exactly unconstitutional, but combine the way Lavabit is architected with the scope of the search, and you've essentially given them the keys to the kingdom.

Are there any older physical parallels to this? What happens if the police, in the process of securing a lawful warrant, require access to a physical master key or combination or etc. which would open a great deal more than access to the suspect's belongings?

<comment><USER8> It appears that the FBI's original request was narrowly targeted to Snowden and completely above board, warrant and all. It didn't give them the keys to the Kingdom.

When lavabit refused to comply,the FBI got more aggressive. Which seems like exactly what would happen. Think about it. What if the FBI subpoenaed financial records from a Bank who refuses to open the safe they were in. Well, the US Marshals are going to show up at the bank with a court order,break open the vault, and get access to all the records and take the one they want. It's not an unreasonable search provided there are checks that they only get the one record they are looking. In fact, arguably the Bank breached it's duty to it's customers by forcing the US Marshals to go through all their records rather than the Bank doing it self.

Obviously, it's not so clear in this case since Lavabit apparently finally did offer to hand over some data, but it is along those lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit At first I was more on the Lavabit side on this. But it is looking more like they started the whole thing when they defied the initial court order to provide connection info for that one specific user that was the target of an FBI investigation. When served with a warrant, you can't just tell them to fuck off and expect the matter to be over. They will simply go harder... and not go home. I'm concerned that our outrage over "mass surveillance being used for fishing expeditions" has clouded our judgment when it comes to "law enforcement legitimately gathering evidence for an active case against one specific person." Once they have a person of interest, their job is to continue to find evidence to bolster their case. That evidence will take different forms and come from different sources. I have no problems with companies complying with search warrants and court orders by providing evidence regarding illegal activity of a particular suspect. This is different than providing back doors for law enforcement to go _looking_ for suspects.

A commenter on that story makes a good point: Forget for a moment that the user they were looking for was Snowden. If the FBI had been looking for info for a case against a serial killer or a child porn ring, would we still hold Lavabit as heroes for not following the court order?

<comment><USER9> Lavabit didn't know who they where protecting. This has a merit

<comment> jack-r-abbit But they knew they were protecting someone under investigation for _violations of the Espionage Act and theft of government property_. It seems kind of shitty to not help find that person.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, because in the time frame this was going down, it would have been a totally unreasonable assumption that someone matching those particular crimes described Edward Snowden.

Of course they knew who they were looking for - it was necessary for that to be disclosed in order for the government to even demand the information in the first place. That's what a warrant _is_.

For as much was wrong with the government's request, it's first request was at least reasonable: specific knowledge on Edward Snowden. The inherent architecture of Lavabit rendered this request unreasonable, and things escalated from there.

Sure enough, the court documents and transcripts clearly have "target" followed by blacked out spaces _just_ wide enough for Snowden, spoken by both lawyers and Mr. Levison. This happens dozens of times throughout the recently unsealed documents.

<comment> jack-r-abbit I didn't say they did or did not know who it was. I don't know if they knew or not. I responded to someone who claimed they didn't know as if that was an excuse. Whether they knew or not isn't even relevant for me. At a minimum, they at least knew what the person was under investigation for... which should have been enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > [The] government's clearly entitled to the information that they're seeking, > and just because you-all have set up a system that makes that difficult, > that doesn't in any way lessen the government's right to receive that > information just as they could from any telephone company or any other > e-mail source that could provide it easily

I find the sense of entitlement the FBI had quite disturbing. Perhaps it is technically true, but they clearly had an attitude not just that they were legally authorized to access such information, but that nobody should be allowed to stop them having it, and any personal cost involved or moral objection is not part of the equation. For me the two do not connect that way - I am entitled to buy a house but nobody is required to help me do it, and if I don't have the money, I'm screwed. It doesn't allow me to murder the guy down the street so that I can take his money to buy the house I want.

The question is, is the FBI allowed to recruit any civilian to do anything they think is necessary to get at some information they are authorised to acquire? Can they go to your grandmother and tell her to prostitute herself if that will help them? At what point does technical ability to accomplish something render you at the mercy of the state to do whatever they tell you? It is one thing to demand someone actively stop obstructing something. But to demand they actively assist goes a step further. The notion of conscientious objection has been accepted and even honoured and respected, even in times of war.

I don't know where this line is. But I know I'm very uncomfortable with the attitude that law enforcement showed in this case.

<comment><USER12> The FBI is not allowed to break the law, and the Constitution is the law.

If Snowden showed that some people in government were violating the Constitution, and other people in government were trying to suppress his evidence, would that not mean that the people trying to suppress the evidence are complicit with the violators?

Even if these people didn't swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, it is still the law, and they are still bound to obey it.

So, what's the penalty for helping someone violate the US Constitution? And who enforces that?

<comment><USER13> Participating in a drug deal to convict someone of the crime is certainly one example of them breaking the law. IMHO, they should only be allowed to arrest someone in a drug deal between two bona-fide drug dealers. Participating as one of the two parties in a transaction should be illegal.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't be sure, I'm pretty sure legal entities are allowed to employ entrapment in a lot of cases. Watch episodes of Cops, for example, they will attempt to buy drugs and arrest the dealer, or attempt to get people to solicit prostitution from an undercover (female) officer.

Basically, people should stick to the law; dealing drugs or soliciting paid sex are both crimes, no matter who you do it to/with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Awesome decision. It's easy to say it was the right call from the sidelines but it's also easy to underestimate the personal cost that must have been involved with walking away from his company, especially with the gag orders making it impossible to discuss his reasons.

<comment><USER16> There was more than a personal cost. The staff of Lavabit had no idea what was happening as the servers were being shut-down, until they were told to go home.

[http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showpost.php?p=558661&postco...](http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showpost.php?p=558661&postcount=93)

 _I apologize; it was not my intent to mislead (though it appears that I did so inadvertently). I was told that the outage was related to maintenance regarding the storage system_

from one of the Lavabit admins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Theresa Buchanan is the same judge who ordered Twitter to turn over info on WikiLeaks [http://www.salon.com/2011/01/08/twitter_2](http://www.salon.com/2011/01/08/twitter_2)

</comment><comment><USER18> > In a work-around, Levison complied the next day by turning over the private > SSL keys as an 11 page printout in 4-point type. The government called the > printout "illegible" and the court ordered Levison to provide a more useful > electronic copy.

 _How_ illegible? I'm really curious about this part.

<comment> jack-r-abbit They go on to say that it was 2,560 characters. That many chars at 4pt type should not have taken 11 pages. That is roughly 233 chars per page. Even at normal point size, 1 page will hold more than 233 chars. at 4pt I would expect it to all fit on one page. Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER19> We don't know how many characters per line there were. A page contains about 130 lines at 4 point font.

<comment> jack-r-abbit That is what I don't get. If 4pt gives you 130 lines per page, you would only need to fit 20 chars per line to fit the entire thing on one page. With 2560 chars on 11 pages means 233 chars per page at 130 lines per page, we end up with roughly 2 chars per line.

We already know he was basically giving them the middle finger by printing it AND printing it very small. He would clearly need to do something extra odd to make it do this.

<comment><USER10> You can see how he did it on the court documents (it's attachment A on page 145-150).

He might have done some less efficient encoding, like Base-16.

<comment><USER20> And that's only 6 pages... it looks like he printed it in 11 columns spanning 5.5 pages...

<comment><USER10> I think the court documents have two pages per page.

But still very much illegible.

He could have been "helpful" and provided ancillary information along with the keys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Lavabit are freaking heroes.

<comment><USER22> Without taking a stance on this statement, I think it's important to realize how alarming it is that simply _trying not to betray the trust of your users_ has become such a difficult, dangerous, and unusual task as to be called heroism.

The intelligence community has put us in such a bad spot that anyone who actually tries not to do something unethical, which should really be the default, is now exceptional and lauded.

Lavabit stood up, and that's admirable. That it's _this_ admirable is a really bad sign.

<comment><USER23> Well the founder pretty much had to throw away his livelihood as well as part his dream to do something that could land him in jail, for someone he had never met.

He could have easily quietly given them the key (if he had it?), and then live the rest of his life with success and guilt.

Very, very few people would throw themselves in front of a bus the size of the US government to save an honest stranger. Those people are worthy of calling heroes.

<comment><USER22> _Very, very few people would through themselves in front of a bus the size of the US government to save an honest stranger._

That's exactly my point. _This is not a situation he should have been in._ In our current political environment, absolutely, his actions were heroic. But all he did was what he should have done. That the potential consequences for that are so horrifying is what makes this entire situation incredibly wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Everybody note that the SSL key demand came only after Lavabit declined to turn over information on one user. I can understand the logic of this from the feds' perspective; they tried to do it the "right" way but Lavabit refused to cooperate so then the feds starting trying progressively more aggressive approaches to get the data.

<comment><USER25> The problem is that in order to get that information the first way Lavabit would have had to write code that made all of their business claims a lie.

<comment><USER26> That's true. But then, engage with the question of whether those promises were reasonable. "Even if we have the capability of complying with a request for information on a specific user, we will resist the courts". There's a reason providers tend not to make that promise: keeping it can involve going out of business.

<comment><USER25> That's not the promise they made, rather it was that they had not developed and would not develop any means to circumvent the protection/encryption for paying users' accounts.

The 'not complying' is only a side effect, and is more so tantamount to a refusal to do work for the government in opposition to lavabit's own business promises. I'm not sure the government in any instance has a right to compel work to meet their specified ends.

<comment><USER27> That's retarded though. The absence of getpeername calls in their frontend does not constitute an inability to comply with a pen register order.

There are costs of doing business and one of the costs is the ability to comply with lawful court orders. You are completely wrong about the government lacking the means to compel compliance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Like half a dozen people have tried to argue that, because the order was lawful and Levison had complied with previous lawful orders, he has no moral justification for refusing this one.

Let's not beat around the bush. You're willfully missing the point. The lawfulness of the order is not at issue; the target of the order is. I would happily obey a lawful order to turn in a fugitive rapist hiding in my basement; I would not willingly obey a lawful order from the same authority to turn over an escaped slave, even if I lived in a slave-holding nation.

If you don't think that Snowden should have broken the law to inform the public of massive, unsupervised, hidden government surveillance and lies about same, that's fine. But say so, don't go making disingenuous sidewise arguments and thinking you're sly. Yes, Levison disobeyed a lawful order. Laws should be obeyed because they are just, not because they are laws.

<comment><USER29> No, the difference this time is that FBI demanded to install their own equipment inside of Lavabit facilities, having access to all users' data: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6487852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6487852)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This act will be remembered as a "legend".And Lavabit is THE HERO.Standing behind its customers, almost killing itelf.You are my hero !

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm not taking sides against Lavabit here, but it's worth considering the situation here without the Snowden context.

A search warrant was signed by a court for federal agents to retrieve/collect evidence for a specific target. How is what the FBI (and prosecutors) demanded different than a normal wiretap?

edit: If the FBI's order could not be completed in a way that would NOT compromise ALL users, then of course Lavabit should have resisted. My question is based on the assumed validity of this statement in the OP:

> _The July 16 order came after Texas-based Lavabit refused to circumvent its > own security systems to comply with earlier orders intended to trace the > Internet IP address of a particular Lavabit user._

<comment><USER7> Because of what handing over the data would necessarily entail. (If I understand corectly.. someone please correct me if I have this wrong).

The data the FBI wanted wouldn't have just unearthed Snowden's emails, but everything by every Lavabit user. And if you believe that information wouldn't have made its way to certain other 3 letter agencies...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wish Paulson explained where he got this information. Did Lavabit just leak NSL data?

<comment><USER33> First line of the article mentions that they came from unsealed court documents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> My favorite part: The SSL certificate was delivered as an 11 page paper in 4pt font. This is so genius.

<comment><USER35> Why not hand in the characters in 4pt on a single page each? Make it double sided to make it a little more feasible. 233 characters per page is just about nothing at that size, I don't get why they decided to stop at 11 pages.

<comment><USER10> I think it was to avoid being too obviously non-compliant.

Delivering the information this way could be construed as merely avoiding paper-costs while using formats the hide-bound government officers would be most familiar with (paper). It's somewhat facetious, but you can almost say it with a straight face, and a tech-illiterate judge might even accept it (especially if you did something just _slightly_ more legible at 5 or 6 points).

It would be impossible for anyone to claim with a straight face they complied if they did as you described. Lavabit can claim they provided the keys in a fairly digestible format, and it bought them a few days worth of time.

Also, a single character at 4 pt surrounded by whitespace is _much, much easier_ to decode.

Finally, most courts would charge you for delivering that much paper. For similar reasons, paying court fees in pennies is not accepted by all jurisdictions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is pure evil.

<comment><USER37> Don't forget who the ruling class is and how they behave the next time a relevant issue comes around.

<comment><USER36> I don't think it matters since the mass data surveillance thing was started by the Bush Administration...

<comment> barry-cotter The NSA is older than most voters. When talking about the Stasi there is no meaningful difference between the Republicans and Democrats, Labour and Conservatives, etc. They're all politicians and they're all the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I guess Lavabit figured that giving access to the data of one user in the requested way could compromise other users' privacy/security so that would be equal to warrantless wiretapping. Otherwise, what was the problem with following that?

<comment><USER39> The problem was that following it would be a violation of the privacy of Edward Snowden (well, of the user whom we presume to be Snowden) and of the trust which he had placed in Lavabit.

<comment><USER38> Violation of his privacy under warrant is what the law would expect in that case. Violating privacy without a warrant (and probable cause and etc.), that what is unconstitutional. Or you are saying that there can be no investigation at all?

Lavabit even admitted, they already assisted investigators in the past for investigation on a specific user. Apparently that request was legal in the view of the Lavabit owner, so there should be something different here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> There is no way this is not a "general warrant". If it's not overturned in appeal, the US is no longer an acceptable place to host anything or conduct any business operations for anyone (except the USG or regulated entities).

I'm hopeful it will be overturned at the 4th Circuit, rather than waiting for SCOTUS. There are _so many_ ways to challenge it. The only way we'd be fucked would be if Ladar didn't have the money to appeal, but it's a super tempting case for anyone at EFF/ACLU/etc. Funding the appeal to the max would also be in the self interest of any cloud business in the USA.

<comment><USER10> I'd be very surprised if this isn't the landmark case establishing demands for SSL certificates as being too general.

Just like _Jewel v. NSA_ was always destined to be a landmark case, and now will be, after the executive privilege crap got thrown out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is there a bug in HN right now? Why is this story which was posted 4h ago ranked #7 with 436 upvotes, when U.S. Opposes Tech Companies... is ranked #6 with 169 upvotes while it was posted 8h ago and the Google acquisition of Flutter ranked #3, also posted 4h ago, whereas it only has 96 upvotes.

Did the HN ranking algorithm change or did I miss something?

Here the screenshot [http://imgur.com/7Yh9XB2](http://imgur.com/7Yh9XB2)

</comment><comment><USER41> What's the source of this info? Does anyone know?

</comment><comment><USER42> Balls of steel. What a hero.

</comment><comment><USER43> Does this mean SSL is secure?

<comment><USER44> It just means that at least in some possible cases, the way that SSL is broken is by demanding the private keys and installing a transparent proxy or tap outside of the network.

So while it might not be broken in the way we usually expect crypto to be broken, it continues to be broken from a trustability point of view.

<comment><USER45> I dunno. That's exactly the way you _should_ expect crypto to be broken: "don't attack the encryption, attack how it's used"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I commend him him for shutting down Lavabit instead of giving in. It was one of those epic moments where one chooses to take a principled stance on something no matter what the cost.

(Reminds me of a Howard Roark moment to be honest)

</comment><comment><USER47> A service that used a separate subdomain and SSL certificate per user could have avoided such a situation. Though this is an unreasonable burden for a service provider to bear for operating in the US.

<comment><USER48> Huh? You'd still have a private key per certificate. You might have one key for all of them or one key per cert, but you'd still have a private key for each of those certs.

Unless I'm missing something?

<comment><USER47> If I read the article correctly, the Lavabit founder was unwilling to give up the private key because it would compromise all users, not just Snowden.

<comment><USER4> And giving up the SSL key for Snowden wouldn't give them anything useful, since he's probably not checking his US-based email anymore. (And SSL should be in perfect forward secrecy mode, so the private key can't be used to decrypt past sessions.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> The good news here is that Lavabit only started to suffer when the feds came calling for Snowden. Another email provider "Mavabit" could provide a quality encrypted email service for a while as well, as long as we have a supply of trustworthy operators.

</comment><comment><USER50> Am I the only one busting a gut that he printed out the SSL key over 11 pages in 4pt font for them to re-key? Hahahaha that's fucking hilarious... though the kind of OCR software the FBI has access to would no doubt have made short work of this.

</comment><comment><USER51> I wonder why didn't the FBI just use some OCR tool to scan the key?

<comment><USER52> Given the reported "accuracy" of HP scanners and others on the market - i.e. see recent posts on HN - I think that would be worse than typing it out by hand with a magnifying glass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> The title made me think that they managed to get what they wanted.</comment>


Show HN: Sponsored Posts Blocker for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsored-posts-blocker/cefgndhbngdogmalpnhnidnnlkmbicig <comment><USER2> This is like trying to beat up your dad because you don't like what he has to say..even though he is paying all of your bills and feeding/clothing you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure about that analogy haha... But, I admit some of this comes from my frustration when thinking for a second that the post I'm looking at is from someone I'm friends with or follow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How does this differ from something like AdBlock or uBlock?

<comment><AUTHOR> From my experience, adblockers are meant for ads specifically, not promoted or sponsored posts that seem like native content. I've seen some chrome extensions for site specific sponsored content (like facebook), but the one's that I've tried are inconsistent. Which is why I made this :)</comment></comment>


The GUI should be a lot better [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AItTqnTsVjA <comment><USER4> I'd be up for an hour long rant about GUIs but you can't just handwave away the differences between Windows 95 and upwards.

95 was focused on a spatial metaphor like old school MacOS and 98 started the switch to a browser metaphor.

"Why do we have lists of tiny icons to click on instead of hiding big ones until we need them"

It's called putting the parts on the floor, it's why Lego is intuitive.

<comment><USER5> I know that in 95 you can vertical select icons, but in 98 it becomes like text selection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a rant of 1h 17mins. The video is funny but it's very centered on the author's usage of Windows UI, which is obviously very specific.

When you ship a product like Windows you have to be very mainstream, you can offer options to customise the UI, fair enough, but honestly the best option is to be dead boring. Maybe once in while you can bring in a new UX concept. Thinking out of the box and trying to reinvent the wheel like they did in 8 doesn't work.

I'm not trying to defend Windows, I think it's been going downhill in term of UI since 7 but not for the reasons he mentioned.

<comment><USER7> These were my first thoughts too, he's ignoring the kilotons (megatons even) of constraints of a company like Microsoft and its flagship have to navigate around. He's also so far above the average user's understanding of things. Most of my neighbors are not at ease when I tell them to `right-click`

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The video is long and centered on the Windows shell, but lots of it is applicable to the other platforms. It's exactly what I'm interested in and I'm thoroughly enjoying it:

" _Hi! One of the things I like about the Internet is the long tail, which means everybody has specific interests that won't appeal to most people, but for the people who_ are _interested, it really delivers!_ "

[...]

" _Plus what a wonderful choice I'm being given! Choosing between a more secure system, or being able to use my GUI the way I want to!_ "

" _Yeah, I get it! I'm a freak and I'm the only person who's doing this!_ "

" _But riddle me this: why do_ security updates _need to screw with the_ graphics _like this‽_ "

<comment><USER9> GUIs interest me so I'm recording this but his slowly delivered, hectoring tone isn't going to make this easy.

<comment><USER9> After 20 minutes of being shouted at, I got his opinion on icons on the desktop, that he likes "nice looking icons" (icons aren't about nice but recognisability). He wants a one-click wallpaper changer. He likes pretty art. MS UIs are going to crap[0]. I wasn't going to watch more.

He says upfront he's not an expert and he's not. I thought it was close to worthless. YMMV.

[0] true but unhelpful

<comment><USER8> > _He says upfront he 's not an expert and he's not. I thought it was close to > worthless. YMMV._

I see what you mean. In my case it's useful because I went into it expecting not answers, but questions, and that's what I got.

> _After 20 minutes of being shouted at,_

:-D For me it felt as if I was sitting next to him, both yelling at the TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing that surprises me (and may be the source for some of his frustrations) is how much for a power user he uses the mouse. This isn't a criticism, just an observation.

He, fairly, criticises how long it takes for the filename to show up when he hovers over an icon on the task bar. However, I think the vast majority of people at his level would use Alt+Tab which immediately brings up not only larger icons for active applications to swap between, but the filename above.

<comment><USER11> If you have a lot of apps open, Alt-Tab no longer shows them all, you have to repeatedly keep bashing Tab to get the window to scroll down to the hidden ones - there's no scroll bar and mousewheel doesn't work. For this reason, I've completely stopped using Alt-tab on Windows 10.

Win+Tab is the 'replacement' but is slower and riddled with bugs - <USER2> annoying one is that some times it doesn't show the preview of half the apps. Also, the order of the windows is always changing, so you waste time scanning for the app you just used.

You can also type Win+<num> where <num> is 1-9 and that number icon activates from the taskbar. Which is great if you have 10 sticky icons down there, but if like me you don't 'stick' icons to the taskbar, it not as fast (muscle memory etc) or as useful as it could be.

I totally agree with the first part of his video (the main Windows 10 rant). Each iteration of Windows makes it slower for the power user. When the Year of the Linux Desktop is finally upon us, I guess I'll eventually switch. ;)

<comment><USER12> Yeah. I've always wondered why MS puts the window previews there when the Timeline view and multi-desktop view shows the window contents. macOS imo does a much better job: Mission Control is for all graphical work. For power users, Alt+tab is apps only, no previews, and then once you're in an app, you can Cmd+` to cycle through each window. Or, set a gesture to 3-finger-swipe down and see all the windows that belong to a specific app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Remember the gorilla arm.

[http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/G/gorilla- arm.html](http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Long. Much better at high speed (I went 2x). "Gee-Yoo-Eye" rather than "gooey". But quite good in its criticisms, observations, and possible moves foreward.

Overly dismissive of CLI, but I'll excuse that.

<comment><USER15> Long time no see, you old spacecat. I'll refer you to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface)

>The visible graphical interface features of an application are sometimes referred to as chrome or GUI (pronounced gooey).[11][12]

It is also Gif not Jif or Gee I eff. :-p

<comment><USER16> The founder of GIF said JIF, who are you to debate him?

<comment><USER4> It's Graphics Interchange Format not "Jaffics" Interchange Format.

<comment><USER17> [you're probably joking, but in case you're not...]

people also pronounce "GAN" (Generative Adversarial Network) with a hard G even though Generative is a soft G (J).

and how do you pronounce "MUA" (Mail User Agent)? I'd go with moo-ah, even though it's not a Mail Oozer Ahgent :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> kalium-xyz The changing UIs are essentially a marketing sceme, not having to retrain how to use a UI is almost always significantly better. Mobile UIs on the other hand have really improved in the last decade.

When I first moved to Japan I was appalled by all the old GUIs used everywhere and the never renewing systems (still using fax for example), now I think that changing styles every few years without good reason should be a crime.

</comment><comment><USER18> To have a great GUI, beyond looking nice and getting out of the way, it must be intuitive, and for that you need a metaphor that works, but the moment you use one you are also constrained, it's a very hard problem IMO.

I like in the video is touching on Science fition interfaces, I found this video[1] you might ejoy, the author Chris Noessel has a google talk[2] about intefacing with AI in different ways and touches on interaction design, I'm trying to learn more about this.

There was a link posted on HN that I can't find anymore, it was about better UI metaphors dropping breadcrumbs to traceback your path when you navigate across different sites and some 3D desktops with piles of documents ... I know is vague description, if annyone knows that link, please share :)

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

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cciGZ3BsLwA&t=1973s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cciGZ3BsLwA&t=1973s)

<comment><USER19> > To have a great GUI, beyond looking nice and getting out of the way, it must > be intuitive, and for that you need a metaphor that works.

I don't buy that there is "good" GUI design in any absolute sense. "intuitive" is thrown around with too little thought in GUI discussion even though it is ambiguous.

When disassembling the meaning of intuition is turns into familiarity - <USER3> there is a whole spectrum of familiarity. At the most fundamental there is _innate_ familiarity e.g direction, which is why arrow keys and cursor input are innateley intuitive. At the other end of the spectrum we have high level design mimicry or historical use, skeumoprhism, e.g the floppy disk save icon, checkboxes, 3D relief in UI elements as a reference to physical input devices.

This is why "good" and "efficient" GUI design is also highly subjective, not because we don't all share a history that can be tapped for familiarity, surfacing conventions which are hard to escape - but because it's possible to be more efficient, more effective if we abandon those short term shortcuts and only hold onto the innate intuitions.

For example I use a tiling window manager, I get to define my own shortcuts - all of them. I find it intuitive to alt+arrow-key to change window focus, and shift+alt+arrow-key to move a window - this comprises innate intuition + artificial almost contextless fabrication - i.e no normal user would be able to figure it out without reading a manual or defining it for themselves.

This would also not generally be considered good GUI design, because it's not discoverable by people who are already familiar with historical GUIs, you have to put in effort to learn it - as would an alien using windows UI. and yet it is more efficient...

In summary, "good" GUI design for the masses is highly constrained and dictated by history, not ability to conjure up good metaphors.

<comment><USER20> > I don't buy that there is "good" GUI design in any absolute sense. > "intuitive" is thrown around with too little thought in GUI discussion even > though it is ambiguous.

Long ago, in the primitive time of the 1980s, people actually did studies to show what worked and what didn't in GUI design. Almost all the lessons learned from those studies have been thrown away and replaced by... I don't even know. Gut feeling? Ease of implementation? Prettiness? Certainly not usability studies.

<comment><USER14> References?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The idea of hiding all the icons when not on the screen surprised me... I've been using computers since 1979, and never thought of doing that. I do like his point about the increasingly small and easy to miss targets that GUIs have been forcing on us... especially now that my laptop has a 1920x1080 display and a crappy NO BUTTON touch pad. (more than 1/2 of the time I get a right- click instead of left-click!)

If I could somehow activate a menu with maximum 8 choices in each keyboard direction (that are NOT subject to automatic moving around, so that a given motion is repeatable)... and cascade that as many levels deep as required.... I could get a lot more done, a lot faster.

It was worth the watch time, thanks!

<comment> frosted-flakes Re: touchpad buttons, I recommend enabling two-finger tap for right click, and disabling bottom-right tap for right click.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I nearly threw up as soon as he revealed his win-gnome frankendesktop. This is NOT what was supposed to happen.

</comment><comment><USER23> Watched about 20 minutes. Maybe there's a point hidden somewhere in between his rantings, buts it's quite hard to grasp it. He moves back and forth between actual criticism of the Windows UI and just stuff that he personally likes as an advanced user.

I agree that Windows is far from perfect (I'm mostly a Mac user) but IMO the biggest issue is complexity. For tech savvy users all these are non issues, but for my Mom it would be impossible.

OTOH she can operate an iPhone just fine.

<comment><USER24> Lessons from the video: Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

Fitt's law is a good guidepost for efficient GUI design.

Don't break backwards compatibility.

The GUI should immediately show the information the user demands when he commands it to.

Unnecessary UI elements should be hide-able.

Mouse gestures are underutilized and should be standardized.

The UI shouldn't interfere with the user's tasks; hitting the Windows key shouldn't kill your game.

GUI is actually pronounced "Gee-you-eye" and not "gooey".

Steve Jobs was actually GUI Hitler and Microsoft killed baby GUI Jesus.

<comment><USER25> > GUI is actually pronounced "Gee-you-eye" and not "gooey".

I always thought acronyms were pronounced phonetically whenever possible, like NASA, SCUBA, etc.

Even if that's not the case, "gooey" has become ubiquitous enough to be the colloquial pronunciation.

<comment> frosted-flakes I have always spelled it out in my head, and the first time I heard someone say it I was utterly confused as to what they meant. To me, if I were to try to pronounce it, it would sound like "guy", as in the first syllable of "guide". Unlike Nasa or scuba, there's no universally obvious pronunciation for GUI—and thus I think it should be spelled out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hey, this guy sounds like the Freeman's Mind guy...

> goes into channel

Hey, this _is_ the Freeman's Mind guy!

</comment><comment><USER26> I can't believe I actually watched all of that. No regrets.

</comment><comment><USER27> While there are loads of valid criticisms here, a lot of time is wasted on complaining that Windows broke the weird, buggy shell customisation tools and modules that the author uses.

Some of the problems ("why are these resources in DLLs and not files") are there because if Microsoft changes them, loads of programs break for many more people. As opposed to the people behind many shell customisation tools, other programs do use the APIs that were intended to be used by developers and Microsoft actually tries to keep compatibility with those above some kind of quick launch menu some guy customised back in the XP days.

I think this guy would be excellently at home on Linux, although he picked some of the more fancy distros as examples in his video. His Windows setup reminds me of LXDE and XFCE. The dock, the floating panels, everything can be replicated and practically guaranteed to work despite updates. Now, program compatibility for stuff like video editors is an entirely different subject so I don't expect this person to switch, but as far as GUI problems go, Linux is the best place to solve them to prove your point.

There's one problem though, and that's that nobody cares about you and your long tail. Linux people used to be all about this stuff and that's why Linux was always considered arcane and unusable. Linux shell developers used to develop a lot of their software for themselves and their usage patterns instead of for others, making their only usable for people with the same expectations. Because of the lack of a unified GUI, there will never be centralised settings for the entire system, there's always long text files. If you are in the long tail, pick up Arch and go ham. But please, for the love of God, leave the GUI for normal people alone.

I used to do tech support over the phone, which most commonly consisted of getting people to launch Teamviewer and fixing whatever problem they had. Every fancy, smart, helpful feature that some whizzkid installed to help their parents made it completely impossible to help those people. They don't know what a start button is, they can't describe their screen to you, there's no standard buttons, labels or anything to help people, manuals are suddenly all wrong ("I've got the start menu open but I don't see control panel" because the shell renamed it to "settings") and auto hiding task bars made people think their computer was broken.

There's improvements to be made, but most people require simplicity over customisability. Custom icons break software, break expectations and often break metaphors. Custom task bars break old, buggy business software that hundreds of thousands of people rely on. Hell, I've seen some tools break because I decreased the width of window borders by a few pixels. Every customisability option needs to be tested for functionality and compatibility and developers' time is much better spent at making features normal people care about.

You want a perfect shell no matter the cost? Build one. The shell launch API is there in Windows, changing most system icons is supported through the registry. Window theming for most of the OS can still be used through the Windows 2000 theming system. Even more is possible by passing certain system messages to windows of other programs like explorer. You'll break stuff, but you'll break them just the way you like it. Don't expect anyone to build a GUI for you if you know your requirements don't matter for the vast majority of people.

<comment><USER14> _I used to do tech support over the phone..._

Oddly enough, a domain in which CLI can really shine.

"Open a terminal" (give the hotkey sequence if necessary). "Type ..." (say or spell commands).

If all else fails, SSH in directly.

Yes, remote desktop offers somewhat similar capabilities, but with far higher bandwidth requirements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I watched half of it. Will most likely finish soon. I like the guys passion. I had some experience trying to run litestep in the past and I was really into things like windows blinds for a while. Looking at his setup, it looks infuriating,but if it works for him, that is what is important.

</comment><comment><USER29> I checked LiteStep. For something that wants to improve the GRAPHICAL user interface, their website is ugly

\+ the only date available on the site is 2012. Is it maintained?

<comment><USER30> No, I was a heavy LiteStep user during its prime Windows XP days, but even then it was a brittle, badly developed and hard to set up thing. Development has stalled once Vista and 7 came along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Loved all the Space Quest games

Have there been any remastered editions created by the community that are worth the experience?

</comment><comment><USER32> Too much talking. The idea of eliminating double click seems reasonable. The main problem is speed. Windows became very slow and big.

<comment><USER6> It's interesting but there have been an option in Windows to open folders / files with one click since XP at least.

<comment><USER33> I think Web-style navigation was introduced as an option in Windows 98, along with Active Desktop. Back then, Microsoft envisioned merging local file system and web browsing in Explorer, a direction they later reversed when the IE/Windows lawsuit hit.</comment></comment></comment>


Groupcache (memcached replacement in Go) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/golang/groupcache

<comment><USER2> Originally developed by bradfitz (original author of memcached) and used in production at Google.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks very interesting, thanks for the link.</comment>


Flexbox in 5 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://flexboxin5.com/ <comment><USER2> Flexbox in 5 minutes*

* (Not including 6 hours of painstaking hacks to make it work with Safari and IE10) ;)

I love Flexbox and use it for all my projects now, but yeah: it's important to keep in mind that a lot of browsers out there have a buggy/incomplete implementation of it.

This is a great resource if you're just starting to use flexbox in a real- world webapp and want to catch issues early: [https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs](https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs)

<comment><USER3> Yep! As mainly an Objective-C programmer (and not much of a web developer) I was very excited about flexbox when I had to work on a native OS X app that edits grids of photos in the app but also exports to web.

Legacy browsers were not a requirement (yay!) so I was all over flexbox, and indeed it took about 5 minutes to get it working perfectly in Firefox and Chrome. Sadly, after another 20+ hours of trying to get it working in Safari we had to declare it a failed effort, and give up on flexbox.

It _almost_ worked but Safari had layout bugs that would render things in the wrong place, or inappropriately partially outside the visible bounds of the window.

(This was -- _checks git_ \-- April 2015. I still click every link about flexbox on HN waiting to see somebody say it Safari support for it has improved.)

<comment><USER4> Safari 9.0 and WebKit builds seem to show conformance in my limited testing.

<comment><USER3> HEY! Just came back here to say you are right. Installed the developer beta of OS X 10.11 today (which includes Safari 9) and tried to open some of the output files from the old project mentioned above.

They all work in OS X Safari now.

None of them really stress-test flexbox or do anything advanced; they are just grids that are supposed to resize well. But, the bugs we hit doing this basic stuff in OS X 10.10 / Safari 8 seem to be fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm really looking forward to being able to use flexbox, but, well, I think a screenshot says it best: [http://imgur.com/mUVouiJ](http://imgur.com/mUVouiJ)

<comment><USER6> Maybe it's not broken, maybe it's a new trend, in this information rich modern world having text to read isn't enough, we need text on top of the text so we can double read and process information _twice as fast as before_. Safari is just way ahead of the game. #fanboi

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was looking into flexbox a little time ago and came away with the impression that display:table, while a bit less elegant, is substantially better supported and a plausible solution for right now. Flexbox seemed to be more a possibility for some unspecified future.

(In that both are only supported in relatively recent browsers, but display:table was supported a bit further back, and across some important point, probably some important IE version, but I don't remember the details).

Has that changed?

<comment><USER8> Nope [1] - IE support only landed in IE10, and is only really usable in IE11 and Edge. In general, IE 8 and under is currently the cutoff for legacy browsers that no modern web technologies and polyfills will bother supporting anyway, and display:table is supported at least that far back [2].

[1] [http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox](http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox)

[2] [http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-table](http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-table)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a great guide. I've also got a set of free videos for learning flexbox as it's such a visual thing [http://flexbox.io](http://flexbox.io)

<comment><USER10> I signed up to this when you posted it on Hacker News...never got an email from you though? (just searched my email for flexbox.io to check)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/](https://css- tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/)

CSS-Tricks has a pretty handy guide, too. If I need a quick reference when developing, that and MDN are my go to.

<comment><USER12> Since another posted the same link, I'll post my response here as well with an additional link.

[https://css-tricks.com/using-flexbox/](https://css-tricks.com/using-flexbox/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really cool!

This paired with [https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to- flexbox/](https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/) makes up really good tools for learning and quick ref for flexbox.

<comment><USER12> For explanations of older browsers implementation, there's this as well.

[https://css-tricks.com/using-flexbox/](https://css-tricks.com/using-flexbox/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been holding back jumping into this because of browser support. But I'm tired of waiting. Flexbox is easily the best most exciting layout mode in CSS, and I need to start using it for site builds.

Responsive the way it was meant to be.

I'll figure something out for iOS compatibility and other mobile browsers that fall short. The benefits and potential are too good.

I don't know why anyone would continue clutching to clunky grid frameworks and the tired old "3 things we do" look when these new layout modes are catching on. So much design potential without the pain means more affordable _interesting_ responsive sites. I just hope the browsers lagging behind in support get their act together (Safari).

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I love Flex Box, but the myriad of errors in Safari has left me disappointed. I'm still puzzled why they continue to push this without addressing any of these issues.

Considering a majority of my clients and their customers use Safari on mobile, this is a total non-starter for me. This also sucks because I was really liking the Angular Material framework and can't use it because its based on Flexbox as well.

Considering this site has been broken for months, I'm not optimistic this will get fixed any time soon.

<comment><USER15> This is more of an issue with Safari than anything else - Apple's slow speed at keeping up with web standards is reasonably well documented ([http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new- ie/](http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/)) (note: this article generated a fair amount of controversy when it was originally posted on HN)

I've just tried this site in the very newest OSX Safari and it looks dreadful. Disappointing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Previously discussed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137515)

</comment><comment><USER17> Fantastic guide, I've seen flexbox around but haven't looked into it because of browser support issues, but this guide was a great (quick) primer on how to use flexboxes and how amazing (and relatively easy to use) they are.

Even if you can't use flexboxes right now, I still think this is a worthwhile guide to look at -- especially if you can control the devices/browsers you support (and it doesn't hurt your core business too much)

</comment><comment><USER18> Definitely look at this before you use React Native. RN makes heavy use of flexbox for layouts, and if you come from living in a world of <div style="position: relative; margin-left: x;"> then it can be a bit foreign. As for browsers, I'm still waiting on more flexbox adoption.

</comment><comment><USER19> > ...while we've got these three fixed-width items here, take a minute or two > to explore the container styling options at the top of the page.

Where?

</comment><comment><USER20> Distantly related, but might be useful for anyone using Bootstrap, flexbox doesn't seem to work with Bootstrap' carousel.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a repost from like 6 months ago.

<comment><USER19> It says that Firefox 28 was just released which means it's from early 2014.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Advantage over Bootstrap in 5 seconds?

<comment><USER8> They go together; Bootstrap 4 will have an option to use flexboxes to implement its grid system.

It's an option and not the default because there are a _lot_ of browsers out there that don't support flexboxes yet; give it a few years and this will be a much more practical choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does not render right on my mobile.

<comment><USER23> Does not render right in Firefox 40.0.3, too. Tried different Window sizes, some blow up the Layout

<comment><USER12> I think it's more likely it doesn't render correctly in your Firefox.</comment></comment></comment>


Don't Feed Them After Midnight: Reverse-Engineering the Furby Connect - <AUTHOR> https://www.contextis.com/blog/dont-feed-them-after-midnight-reverse-engineering-the-furby-connect <comment><USER2> Site is down for me. archive.org works: [http://web.archive.org/web/20171124170013/https://www.contex...](http://web.archive.org/web/20171124170013/https://www.contextis.com/blog/dont- feed-them-after-midnight-reverse-engineering-the-furby-connect)

</comment><comment><USER3> All it takes is a single goatse to appear on one child's furby's eyes or on a demo unit in a shop and the brand is ruined. I think they need to reconsider that response.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps you're unaware that an earlier edition of this product had a bug that made the device randomly speak with a terrifying satanic voice. My niece experienced it first hand

<comment><USER5> I had one when I was a kid. Hilariously it did the satanic voice after I threw it against a wall. Didn't do that again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This could be the perfect thing to announce a failing code build.....begone old traffic light systems, Jenkins + Furby could be a thing of beauty.

</comment><comment><USER7> Company response is "Yeah, that's way too hard, nobody can do that".

</comment><comment><USER8> Company response is so typical, it hurts to read.

<comment><USER9> Why? As long as it doesn't have a microphone/camera then this sounds like a positive.

<comment><USER10> And they don't collect any sort of personal data. Hasbro did a pretty solid job here minimizing risk surface area.

<comment><USER8> Bluetooth LE range is easily magnified with a cantenna. The device will play audio sent to it over an unencrypted unauthenticated link to your kids. Also it will show videos sent over the same link (but they must be small because eyes are small)

Both of these are problems for some parents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why don't they just enable basic Bluetooth security features instead of saying that it's too hard to exploit and leaving it at that?

Excellent write-up though.

<comment><USER12> Are those features included in BLE? AFAIK it's a completely separate protocol than regular Bluetooth.

<comment><USER13> BLE supports pairing and bonding. It is optional, by default every connection is unencrypted and unauthenticated.

<comment><USER14> Pairing is a big paint point though AIUI, releasing this toy with the need to pair it first would probably have cost them significant numbers of returns. Not saying it's justified, but ...

Perhaps they could give away an optional tin-foil suit for furbies of owners who have security concerns!

<comment><USER13> Oh yeah, totally. BLE support on both android and iOS is lacking. Older versions of android, and I believe all versions of iOS (please correct me if I'm wrong) do not offer a programmatic way of supplying the pin for pairing. This means that when you programmatically connect to a BLE device from an app, the user will get a pin prompt. This prompt covers most of the screen so it really is a pain.

Though for the furby it shouldn't be too bad. Just display the pin on one of its eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The company response stated:

> A tremendous amount of engineering would be required to reverse engineer the > product as well as to create new firmware.

Which implies they failed to understand what they were being told. The engineering required to do this exploit has already been done, so it doesn't matter how hard it is. Once it's been done, it's been done.

</comment><comment><USER16> I believe they ought to reevaluate that reaction.

</comment><comment><USER17> But it's always after midnight

</comment><comment><USER18> "while the FURBY CONNECT toy is in a "woke" state" I couldn't help but chuckle at this.

<comment><USER11> woke asf</comment></comment>


Telomerase Therapies in Our Future - <AUTHOR> http://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/telomerase-as-a-fountain-of-youth/

<comment><USER2> After a quick search, much of the TA-65 commentary seems to be well-placed SEO-optimised junk. Some of it seems like it could be 'affiliate program' stuff too. If you can add to the debate sensibly, consider contributing here or upvoting: [http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8967/does-a- mole...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8967/does-a-molecule- called-ta-65-reverse-aging-in-humans)

While trying (perhaps unsuccessfully) to avoid an ad-hominum attack, here's some other info on the author:

Positive, perhaps: [https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.joshua.mitteldorf](https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.joshua.mitteldorf)

Negative, perhaps: [http://www.scientistsfor911truth.org/mempages/Mitteldorf.htm...](http://www.scientistsfor911truth.org/mempages/Mitteldorf.html)

<comment><USER3> TA-65 is indeed a bunch of herbal junk, sold by the usual suspects.

Mitteldorf on the other hand is a legitimate theorist with a programmed aging viewpoint, e.g. that the best approach to aging is to find differences in levels of gene products and push those levels back to being closer to what they were in youth - to revert the program. You can probably see why he's interested in anything that might provide a step towards studies that could add supporting evidence, even if not effective to a practical level.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Mitteldorf%20J%5BAu...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Mitteldorf%20J%5BAuthor%5D)

Not a view I agree with, as I see the balance of evidence supporting the more mainstream view of aging as a consequence of accumulated damage, with these changes in gene product levels being a response to that damage. Aging research is certainly a field with a lot of varied opinions on what exactly is going on under the hood. Still, programmed aging is a minority camp at this time, albeit a very vocal one.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'll look into him more.

Also: the first time you hit the above link above, the site gives a 'no history' error and doesn't return any results - which is unintentionally funny, I guess. :) Searching does return some results though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > In fact, evolution has not worked to maximize life span, but only to make it > sufficient to assure time for reproduction.

Longer life spans would /slow down/ evolution. Evolutionary lines with very long lifetimes would evolve more slowly than evolutionary lines with shorter lifetimes, and would be quickly overtaken by them.

Of course, all of us alive today would be happy to make that trade off going forward ;)

<comment><USER5> Does evolution matter for a species where every sick offspring is saved at birth?

<comment><USER6> Yes. Because we still have a situation where not every person becomes a parent, and those that do have wildly different numbers of offspring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> To date progress in the development of stem cell treatments has been accompanied by a markedly lower risk of cancer than was expected at the outset. The characteristic decline in stem cell activity with age is believed to be an evolutionary adaptation that reduces cancer risk: there is a balance between on the one hand the risk of cancer due to over-active damaged cells, and on the other hand the failure of tissues and organs due to loss of maintenance activities on the part of stem cells. It is the responsibility of stem cells to deliver supplies of fresh, fit cells as needed to replace those that have become damaged, worn, or have reached the inherent limits imposed on replication of somatic cells. That supply tapers off in old age, however, as stem cells gather damage and spend ever more time quiescent rather than active.

Despite the comparative lack of cancer resulting from stem cell therapies, there is still every reason to expect that caution should attend the development of any therapy that spurs greater regeneration in old tissues. The cells in those tissues have a higher load of nuclear DNA damage, and thus a greater cancer risk attends their activity. Yet in practice it isn't working out to be as great a risk as expected, or at least not so far based on the data gathered to date. Why this is the case is an interesting question with no solid answer at this time.

The replication limits of somatic cells depend in part on telomere shortening. Telomeres are repeated lengths of DNA at the ends of chromosomes. A little of that length is lost with each cell division, and very short telomeres trigger cellular senescence or programmed cell death. In comparison stem cells retain long telomeres, and thus the ability to continually create new daughter somatic cells with long telomeres to deliver into the tissues they support. This maintenance of telomere length in stem cells is achieved through the activity of telomerase, an enzyme that adds repeated DNA sequences to the ends of chromosomes.

Based on all of the above, it is not unreasonable to expect that more telomerase activity in more cells would mean a greater risk of cancer. It would mean cells being more active, and older, more damaged cells being more active. In mice, however, this is not what happens. The risk of cancer actually falls, even as life span is lengthened: researchers believe there is increased stem cell activity and tissue maintenance, but not enough time in even the extended mouse life span for the other shoe to drop and cancer risk to catch up. A firm and comprehensive analysis of what exactly is going on inside these mice is probably still a few years away, however. Nonetheless, the picture painted above suggests that we should be cautious about extrapolating a beneficial balance of time and cellular activity in mice to indicate that telomerase treatments would be similarly great for humans. The span of time is different, our telomere biology is different, and the balance of aging and cell activity is different.

On the other hand, the medical community seems to be doing pretty well with stem cell treatments that are just another way of spurring increased cell activity and tissue maintenance in old, damaged tissues. Enhanced telomerase activity seems worthy of further investigation for all the same reasons that stem cell therapies were worthy of clinical development. I don't see telomerase therapies as a treatment for aging per se, however. The approach of increased telomerase activity doesn't address the underlying issues that cause stem cell decline, but instead forces damaged cells to get back to work by overriding the normal reactions of an aged biochemistry. In the view of aging as accumulated cellular damage, stem cell failure with age is an evolved reaction to an increasingly damaged tissue environment. The best way forward is to repair that environment, not override the signals. As first generation stem cell treatments have shown, however, it is possible to achieve beneficial results by taking this path, even while failing to address the root causes of aging. Benefits are good, but we shouldn't let them distract us from the end goal.

<comment><USER7> >The characteristic decline in stem cell activity with age is believed to be an evolutionary adaptation that reduces cancer risk

This isn't science. This is not a falsifiable statement and is not backed up by any hard evidence. The Reason, with an intentional capital "R" for it could be just about anything. Biology and evolution are really complicated.

There is a huge negative bias in the scientific community with regards to any science that can make significant improvements in human lifespan due to overriding concerns about overpopulation. Thus, the bias when speculating on any life extension technology is that it will have some sort of negative consequence.

<comment><USER3> Overpopulation is really not the origin of much negative bias, and where researchers publish on that topic it is to note that it isn't an issue. E.g.:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/)

However: researchers don't want to be seen as being just another part of the "anti-aging" marketplace of pills and potions and lies, as it has a negative affect on their credibility and ability to raise funds for research. That is the dominant issue, and it has taken a lot of work over the past few decades to get even more adventurous and strong-willed researchers to the point of being willing to talk in public about extending healthy human life spans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be charitable to call this article junk science. In particular, the idea that hTERT expression is a significant cancer risk is quite well- accepted, but heavily downplayed here. In culture, it's possible to immortalize a primary cell line (such that it grows indefinitely) by overexpressing telomerase. In fact, this is how many recent cell lines have made in multiple fields. The stuff about herbal drugs isn't worth even discussing.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find it hard to take seriously an article praising "telomerase-activating herbs and supplements". Sounds like a marketing piece for alternative medicine.</comment>


Ask HN: Dumbing down the Web with frameworks and abstractions - <AUTHOR> I posted a question/rant over on Reddit, and I'd be curious to get the perspective of some HNers.
In summary, do too many Web developers lack a fundamental understanding of underpinnings of the Web?
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b1apt/dumbing_down_the_web_with_frameworks_and/
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
Over the past few years, I've had the opportunity to work with many different Web-centric frameworks, and I've found them a great aid in boosting my productivity. I've used CSS, JavaScript and programming frameworks such as Blueprint CSS, jQuery, Django, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC.
Over the past year, I've been able to introduce several traditional ASP.NET developers to ASP.NET MVC, Blueprint and jQuery. I've been surprised at the lack of fundamental knowledge of how the Web works, and how this lack of knowledge has proven an obstacle for adopting these new technologies.
Before I start my rant, I want to say that these are intelligent, talented developers and that this situation isn't unique to those who grew up on ASP.NET.
So what do I mean by a lack of fundamental knowledge? In my mind, ever Web developer (programmer) should have knowledge of the [suite of protocols](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_Suite) that currently make up the Web:
* TCP/IP
* HTTP
* TLS/SSL
In addition, Web developers should have expert knowledge of:
* CSS
* JavaScript
* HTML
Developers don't need to be subject-matter experts on these, but they should have a fundamental understanding of these protocols and should be able to translate a framework's abstraction into a core protocol.
Some of the issues I've encountered due to a lack of fundamental understanding:
* Ajax -- Developers who have used ASP.NET AJAX have no concept of the HTTP requests that are going on behind the scenes. To them, ASP.NET AJAX removes a "page flicker" (a POST request to the current page, which re-fetches the content).
* Stateless nature of HTTP -- This may be particularly bad with ASP.NET. [Viewstate](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASP.NET#View_state) can be very confusing, and trying to reconcile how it works with how HTTP itself works is a challenge. Unfortunately, many developers never take the time to understand it fully, and it becomes part of the way they think the Web works.
* HTML/Stateless nature -- (ASP.NET's Page Life Cycle)[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178472.aspx] is insane. It was meant to make the Web bahave like a Windows application, and is the fundamental abstraction in traditional ASP.NET. I can't even begin to tell you how much fundamental work is done on the behalf of the developer, and how easy it is for the developer to code without any understanding of what's going between the browser and the server.
* HTTP headers and caching -- Most of the frameworks I've seen provide easy ways to alter HTTP response headers, but few of the developers I know take the time to inspect what the framework is sending on their behalf. A lack of understanding (in general, or of the importance of controlling caching) also leads developers to let their Web server send default HTTP headers.
* HTTP verbs -- Communicating with a RESTful Web service using the different HTTP verbs (let alone building such a service) is (at best) confusing to developers who don't understand HTTP. On a related note SOAP, WSDLs and generated code hide so much from developers that many think calling a Web service is the same as calling a local method.
* HTTP response types -- Is your framework sending 301s when it should be sending 302s?
* SSL -- I recently had a discussion with a co-developer about why a server couldn't perform a redirect to a valid SSL-secured domain (SSL cert CN/SAN matches URL) from an SSL-secured domain that had an invalid certificate. (Think redirecting from https://reddit.com to https://www.reddit.com when you only have the cert for www.reddit.com) The argument I faced was that the Web server redirects the browser "before any request is returned." There was no understanding of the SSL handshake or the fact that the redirect would have to come in the form of a response over SSL.
* HTML -- What is your framework generating for you? Is it eschewing standard HTML submit buttons in favor of images initiating a submit via JavaScript? Is this okay?
* HTML/HTTP -- A datagrid is not an HTML element. The developer should be able to build it by hand and should understand how a datagrid handles interaction and how it manages state. They should be able to build it themselves without any framework-specific help.
* CSS -- A framework like Blueprint isn't magical; its grid is simply a predefined series of classes of specific widths. If you're using a CSS framework, you should be able to build your own (even if it may not look as pretty).
These are but a few of the areas of confusion that I've encountered. As we move to ASP.NET MVC, we've been more exposed to the underpinnings of the Web, and in my opinion, that's a good thing.
I'd like to add that how a framework explains its inner workings has a lot to do with how much a developer can understand without firing up Wireshark. In my experience, ASP.NET has a particularly poor body of fundamental explanations. Microsoft does a poor job of explaining what's happening at a low level, and that permeates the community.
As I said before, frameworks are great, but developers need to understand them at a fundamental level.
I try to make an effort to fully understand the tools I'm using, but how many others do. I'm sure the percentage of those that do is higher here on reddit, but I wonder how high the percentage is in the real world.
How do we ensure that future Web developers take the time to understand their tools and the core technologies that power them?
</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-- </comment><comment><USER2> Isn't this the same as saying that you shouldn't program in Haskell, Erlang, Lisp or Prolog without also being able to program in assembler? And isn't that then the same as saying that you should be able to design circuits with NAND gates? And doesn't it go on to say that you should understand how diffusion processes are used to make integrated circuits?

Actually, I'm with you, but the question is: where do you stop, and why? Personally I've build a CPU from an FPGA, and before that I designed a CPU from NAND gates. Even so, I wouldn't insist that my applications programmers know how to do that. C is useful, assembler also, but I wouldn't insist on it, and even those who only know C++ or Python are still productive programmers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you raise a very good question.

I hadn't explicitly considered it before, as I was writing from my feelings on what a Web developer should know. Let me try to define my cut off.

It's not where the abstraction stops, because TCP/IP/SSL aren't part of the average Web framework (maybe some provide their own server, but I'm not aware of any), but it definitely includes everything the abstraction for framework does.

Is it abstraction + 1 level? Maybe.

I have a feeling different languages and areas have different cut-off points -- Web dev differs from Erlang dev.

For the Web, I think the cut-off point is TCP/IP because it is so central to the way the whole thing works, but is not too technical to be hard for the average developer to understand. As far as SSL/TLS is concerned, I provide a specific example of when an understanding of SSL is needed.

There are reasons go deeper ([http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/10/a_engineers...](http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/10/a_engineers_gui.html) talks about Ethernet frames and payload sizes), but I think an understanding of TCP/IP and the encapsulation they implement will allow a knowledgeable Web developer to understand the technical details.

I don't think there's any place to stop, necessarily, and I think these discussions are useful because they help to shape what we define as important knowledge. So, while I may not have a concrete answer to your question, I think we have a good starting point at which to draw the line.</comment></comment>


Rich CSS: A CLEAN CSS FRAMEWORK - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@richardsondx/rich-css-a-clean-css-framework-45e7e776eef8

<comment><AUTHOR> RichCSS is a CSS framework providing default structures for reusable css element. It's built around an Architectural Style that organizes your code in a way that allows: reusability of your css, versioning, the use of plugins and the ease of using it. RichCSS is bringing convention and organization to CSS that anyone can understand and use. RichCSS uses SASS to extend its capabilities but it can work independently from it</comment>


Brazil Unveils Plans to Censor the Internet to Stop "Fake News" - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2018/01/10/first-france-now-brazil-unveils-plans-to-empower-the-government-to-censure-the-internet-in-the-name-of-stopping-fake-news/ <comment><USER2> This country never fails to amuse me.

We lost a president without proof of any crime. The new president was NOT impeached because recordings of him talking about killing people is "not evidence enough". Taking away people's rights to retire at old age.

What's next? Heavy government surveilance like China? Maybe even higher surveilance, like the USA?

<comment><USER3> Dilma was caught in a letter trying to buy the Paraguay Congress to add Venezuela to Mercosul.

Although I think this had nothing to do with the impeachment.

> without proof of any crime

Is misleading. She deserved to be impeached, and so does the current president, mostly likely so will the next one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know how they plan to implement this, but I see some potential here. No one ever claims that slander and libel laws can't coexist with free speech, so why can't the same principle be applied to malicious rumors in general. Fake news that's explicitly designed to hurt the common good, is just as bad for society as slander and libel. If we can trust our courts to distinguish between valid accusations and slander, why can't we trust them to recognise and punish malicious-fake-news as well.</comment>


Whitehouse starting process to draft data privacy rules - <AUTHOR> http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/privacy-final.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically they're talking about drafting "enforceable codes of conduct", which smells a lot like what PCI Compliance is for credit card numbers. Anybody who's dealt with that can tell you is a clear set of easily-implementable rules that in no way requires you to spend gobs of money on consultants. </sarcasm></comment>


On the Influence of the Sewing-Machine on Female Health (1867) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2309301/pdf/brmedj05595-0006.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Spoilers: Women working on pedal driven sewing machines were complaining of back pains. An alert medical professional also discovered that the women were getting off by the leg movement that drove the machine. Clearly, it was this immoral behavior that was the cause of their back pains.

Pretty remarkable that this line of reasoning was accepted by the brightest and best educated minds only 150 years ago.</comment>


Ask HN: How to reach a mentor? - <AUTHOR> Have an anyone reached to unknown person (guru in certain skills) possibly out of your network to get directions w.r.t technical skills, career guidance etc ? If yes, how to approach and what to expect ? <comment><USER2> This is something I have been asking myself over and over for a while now.

Personally I believe that the mentorship we are looking for comes in many forms such as:

      * articles
      * blog posts
      * books
      * podcasts
      * videos
        * tutorials
        * conferences
        * live streaming
      * IRC channels / slack / you name it
      * meetups

When you cover all this, it makes it easier to become your own mentor in a way and challenge yourself with topics on niche that interests you and feel confident enough to ask questions, no matter how silly they may sound.

Most of the time, my goofy questions provided me valuable feedback by so many experienced people that blew my mind with the availability of options we have.

The more you know, the wiser you become.

The wiser you become, the calmer and more confident you become.

I still have a long journey ahead of me.</comment>


Apple exploring all-in-one MagSafe power and data connector - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/17/apple_exploring_all_in_one_magsafe_power_and_data_connector.html

<comment><USER2> Doesn't this already exist? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet>

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally different purpose. "Fiber on mag-safe power port" can eliminate (doesn't have to) the Ethernet port and adds _any_ future ports that can be multiplexed into fiber's bandwidth. PoE on the other hand can't eliminate the power port due to:

1\. PoE devices are not common.

2\. Ethernet port will never be as ubiquitous as the power socket.

3\. PoE 2009 is rated 51W max, macbook adapters are rated 60-80W (45W for Air).

4\. Say future PoE comes out with 110W rating, Apple can't and won't trust all vendors to follow the standard to eliminate something as important as the power source.

If the PoE does not eliminate the power port, it adds nothing to existing macbooks.

<comment><USER3> Magsafe goes up to 85W for displays and 15"/17" laptops.</comment></comment></comment>


The dark web: Not so anonymous after all - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/futuresin/the-dark-web-not-so-anonymous-after-all-450854d9805f <comment><USER2> Problematic title. It's not "the dark web" that isn't anonymous, it's lack of security by service operators.

"This admin allowed root login via ssh and had 'root' set as password: SSH not so secure after all"</comment>


The eco machine that can magic water out of thin air - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/23/water-mill-eco-invention <comment><USER2> The efficiency of this machine is make-or-break; if it becomes feasable to use in an arid environment, and it's also cheap to produce, this could be world- changing. My intuition, on the other hand, tells me that this is a long time away from becoming ubiquitous, if it ever does. For one, it uses electricity, and environments which are able to support an electrical system usually can also support plumbing. Though it could make for an interesting addition to an environmentally-friendly home.</comment>


GNOME 3.8 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnome.org/news/2013/03/gnome-3-8-released/ <comment><USER2> After losing faith in Unity (the workflow sucks) I reluctantly switched to Gnome Shell. Originally I thought I would have been back to Xfce or Openbox or WindowMaker in an instant.

I was wrong. Gnome Shell has turned out to be quite the bit of kit. It's polished, fast, smooth, and now really stable. The workflow is also incredibly productive and fast.

The only thing I miss is a minimize button, but because the workspace system is so great in Gnome Shell, I don't find myself wanting it all too often, and when I do, I just add another workspace or switch focus.

It's amazing how much thought seems to have been put into this interface. It's equally amazing how many are so quick to shun it.

<comment><USER3> For me the problem isn't so much the new stuff, but what is continually lost. For example, I was a heavy user of emblems and a frequent user of spatial mode, but they are now gone without replacement. I now stumble through hundreds of folders that all look the same.

Want to change the colors they've chosen? No can do... but you know what could do that? Windows 3.1 (and basically every other OS since ~1990) could. :/

That gigantic new clocks app is less useful than the elegant Calendar/Locations dropdown from Gnome2. It's still around in classic-mode but it no longer stays open by default (dunno why).

Five+ years ago I remember there were also helpful apps, like a "service control manager" gui, similar to the Windows MMC that actually worked. Oh, and Ubuntu removed sessions too.

My experience is that the Linux desktop loses as much as it gains every year. Almost twenty years of work and it still feels like a 0.5 alpha. The SGI I worked on 20 years ago could save my session automatically for x-sake, and the GUI was about as good.

<comment><USER4> Have you tried the latest KDE? It's very customisable and hasn't crashed or required manual restart for me once in the last 3 years, even when I leave it running for days.

Edit: It also has session-saving support.

<comment><USER3> I did try it again (after many years) just last month, unfortunately I find it hideous and cluttered, even after an hour or two of tweaking. You're right it should be the answer, but I felt deeply unhappy using it. (My problem I know).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the "Classic mode" is really the biggest, most game-changing thing here. There are a whole lot of people who hate GNOME Shell (I am not one of them. I'm not a fan either, but I don't think the shell is a step backwards) and are either staying on the outdated GNOME2 platform or hacking on top of GNOME3 to bring back GNOME2.

This, I think, is a great solution which acknowledges the desire/need, but addresses it in a way that embraces newer technologies ("classic mode" is built on GNOME3, in fact), rather than simply rolling back to older dated ones.

Kudos to the GNOME team for this and the entire release!

<comment><USER6> So what do you think this means for MATE and Cinnamon?

<comment><USER7> With any luck, a speedy demise.

It doesn't make any sense to have in one corner, an out-of-date desktop environment in MATE, and in the other corner, Cinnamon fragmenting things yet further.

I want a "traditional" DE in the GNOME 2 style, I don't feel the need to have a tablet UI on my desktop PC with keyboard and mouse. But I'd rather not have to go back to ye olde software to do this. I'd like GNOME to take into account those of us who want to use the new technologies without pretending our 17-inch monitor is a 7-inch tablet.

<comment><USER8> After what GNOME developers did with GNOME 3, I wouldn't trust their classic mode one bit. Cinnamon devs clearly understand the UI needs of users, and Cinnamon is already superior to pretty much every DM out there in usability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting to me how all the major next-gen UIs (GNOME Shell, OS X Lion, Windows 8) are all getting huge pushback from users.

<comment><USER10> You may or may not consider it a "major next-gen UI", but I'd throw Ubuntu's Unity in that list as well.

While I'm on the topic, I love the way Unity consolidates system bar, app title bar, and app menu bar. This single screen real estate saving technique is what keeps me using Unity. Every time I switch into Gnome, *box, etc., open Firefox, and see 3 bars all taking up screen real estate, I go back to Unity.

Are there any other shells/window managers/whatever that do this same bar consolidation???

<comment><USER11> Mac OS X only has one bar.

<comment><USER10> Yes, and I know Unity got this from OSX. I should have said, are there other Linux-based shells, etc. that have this feature.

<comment><USER11> Ahh, well it is a pretty sweet use of real estate. I use tiling wm's on linux so I really can't speak to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've really enjoyed Gnome3 and have appreciated the quick cycle of updates.

I just looked at upgrading to 3.8 on Debian Sid/Experimental. Looks difficult, but not too bad... BUT gnome-settings-daemon 3.7.92 depends on __systemd __. Interesting. This may force the conversion from init... And it's systemd v44 (so pretty crusty).

</comment><comment><USER13> Gnome is showing steady improvement with every new release. Really impressive. The first versions of Gnome 3 were sort of lackluster, but nowadays I much prefer it over its predecessor.

</comment><comment><USER14> I knew Red Hat was going to do something to make Gnome 3 more 2-like. It looks like this is it, Classic will be the default in RHEL 7 <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=917679>

</comment><comment><USER15> I finally got fed-up with unity on my laptop and followed some blog instructions to pull the latest apt version of gnome (3.6) and I have to say that so far I have been pleasantly impressed. Its a paradigm shift from classic window managers that I have cut my teeth on but all in all the polish is so much greater than unity.

congrats to the gnome team, not everyone has bought into it but you've converted me.

</comment><comment><USER16> As a KDE user, I'm constantly impressed by the amount of polish the Gnome team put into Gnome Shell.

While I don't like some of their design choice, They are coherent and try to focus on their ideals.

3.8 looks like a nice release, I might try it those days. Anyway, great work and good luck about the future Gnome team!

</comment><comment><USER17> The only thing that I still can't get my head around is Gnome 3's message and notification tray. Gnome 3.0 was released in Oct 2011 and software developers have showed no interest in Gnome's message tray. Most software still don't support or even care about it. In spite of this reality Gnome developers have refused to make any changes to their ideology of system icons and notification. TopIcon extension that puts system tray back to where it belonged has made Gnome useful for me.

<comment><USER18> Weird, but GNOME 3's notification system is what sold it to me. I hated to have tray icons visible all the time, specially because I don't neeed them all the time at all. But that's just me, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder what will happen when Gnome 4 rolls out in the future. Will users jump to it like what happened from Windows Vista -> Windows 7? Will they still yearn for the days of Gnome 2, like some people still wish for Windows XP even though Windows 8 has been released? And why does every situation happening with Gnome seem to have a Windows analogy?

<comment><USER20> people are often rosy-eyed about things they used first/most so they often think things are nicer than they really are.

i remember for the longest time i thought my time with dwm were some of the nicest and yearned for tiling wm's in windows, but after trying it again i'm really glad i switched to win vista/7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I never really understood WHY they felt the need for this radical change in UI. It may have gotten better with new releases, but why did they have to break everything in the first place? What, the usual desktop was not working well? Anyway, I'll give this a try and I'll do my best to not be biased...

<comment><USER22> I never really understood why people feel the need to keep the UI mostly the same. It may not be as good at the first release, but why do people object to them breaking everything at first? What, was everything perfect already?

<comment><USER3> Because they didn't leave any option to "break everything". If the new stuff was mature when released it might be a different story.

Some people actually have work to do however and don't appreciate being forced from a 2.0 to a 0.5alpha without option. Unless you wanted to stay on an unsupported dist for years as I did with Natty (until recently).

Despite my complaints, experimentation is fine in my book... The best way of handling this would be to ship Gnome2 and 3/Unity side-by-side and let the user choose, but 2 was dumped immediately for something broken, unknown, and undocumented. There's no way to stay current without "busting" your desktop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I see there's mixed responses here, but more praise than I expected.

That said, too little, too late for me. I've now moved to a tiling window manager (i3) and I'm not planning on going back.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow. OS X influence is pervasive, but despite (or because of) that, it looks great.

</comment><comment><USER25> screencast <http://youtu.be/ete5Us0-IpY>

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like SkyOS

</comment><comment><USER27> I went to the release notes to see how they implemented the Classic Mode. I was happy to read "Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies..."

\- <https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.8/></comment>


Appcelerator Raises $15 Million, Begins to Expand HTML5 Developer Frameworks - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/11/appcelerator-raises-15-million.php <comment><USER2> Personally, I've never had the incentive to move to a more native framework like Appcelerator. As a Phonegap enthusiast, I may be a tad biased. But a common codebase is hard to pass up, and I'd rather write a plugin in Java or Obj C++ than learn another API that is appreciably different from typical JavaScript practices.</comment>