Here are the 10 countries where homosexuality may be punished by death - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/13/here-are-the-10-countries-where-homosexuality-may-be-punished-by-death-2/ <comment><USER2> Then why is it that Western gay men who have gone to or lived in Saudi Arabia consider it a gay paradise?

<comment><USER3> Source? I've never heard anybody refer to Saoudi Arabia as a gay paradise.

<comment><USER2> "Don't Forget to Tape the Toilets: The Missing Employee Orientation Manual for Saudi Arabia and Bahrain." That's just one.

<comment><USER2> And have you ever spoken to a gay man who lived in Saudi Arabia?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sliden'Joy gives your laptop two additional portable screens (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/slidenjoy-additional-portable-laptop-screens/38268/ <comment><USER2> Having multiple monitors is pretty much the main reason I still prefer working from home with my desktop. I'd love to sit myself down in a coffee shop and work for a few hours but I find my productivity is significantly less without my multi-monitor setup.</comment>


Global sea-level rise could be double our current predictions - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613561/global-sea-level-rise-could-be-double-our-current-predictions <comment><USER2> Ignorant, uninformed question: are insurance actuaries managing mortgages and properties following these updates? What is going to happen to families with land in areas that are going to be permanantly flooded in 10, 20, 30 years? Do we even have a plan for that?

<comment><USER3> And ~~where should I buy my house today to get a good deal on tomorrow's beachfront property?~~ how long until this starts having interesting effects on real estate prices?

<comment><USER4> I think it's impossible to say, since if you were off by a single foot your property would be effectively worthless

I believe sea level rise is already beginning to slow down the housing market in Miami

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the report:

 _For a +2 °C temperature scenario consistent with the Paris Agreement, we obtain a median estimate of a 26 cm SLR contribution by 2100, with a 95th percentile value of 81 cm. For a +5 °C temperature scenario more consistent with unchecked emissions growth, the corresponding values are 51 and 178 cm, respectively. Inclusion of thermal expansion and glacier contributions results in a global total SLR estimate that exceeds 2 m at the 95th percentile._

</comment><comment><USER6> Global sea-level rise, according to previous predictions, which are now certainly incorrect, could be twice as severe, according to our new predictions, which may also be incorrect.

[https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0](https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0)</comment>


Get rid of postinstall message (core-JS) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548 <comment><USER2> There are two ways to look at open-source funding: (A) The maintainers worked hard at this, put up their own time and money to maintain it when they could have been doing other things, therefore you SHOULD (in the RFC sense of the word) pay for it if you can (B) the maintainers saw a problem and solved it, and if you want to donate, that would be nice too, but no big deal if you don't.

I feel like maintainers often start with mentality B, but over time trend toward mentality A.

The actual technical issue in question here doesn't really display a mentality A vs mentality B situation, but if you look at how many people are downvoting him, and how defensive some posters are, you can kind of see it.

Edit: Oh, I forgot that this was the lead-up to it being revealed that the guy was going to prison for a motorcycle accident involving a pedestrian. Ouch. There's somewhat more sympathy from me now, given his circumstances when he made the change!</comment>


Taibbi: Censorship Does Not End Well - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/facebook-censorship-alex-jones-710497/ <comment><USER2> Definitely worth reading entire article, but here are some excerpts that convey the gist:

 _This is the nuance people are missing. It's not that people like Jones shouldn't be punished; it's the means of punishment that has changed radically.

The platforms will win popular support for removals by deleting jackasses like Jones. Meanwhile, the more dangerous censorship will go on in the margins with fringe opposition sites — and in the minds of reporters and editors, who will unconsciously start retreating from wherever their idea of the line is. The most ominous development involves countries asking for direct cleansing of opposition movements, a la China's search engine, or Tel Aviv's demands that Facebook and Google delete pages belonging to Palestinian activists. (This happened: Israel's justice minister said last year that Facebook granted 95 percent of such requests.)

The apparent efforts to comply with government requests to help "prevent the foment of discord" suggest the platforms are moving toward a similar surrender even in the United States. The duopolistic firms seem anxious to stay out of headlines, protect share prices and placate people like Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who just said deleting Jones was only a "good first step." Americans are not freaking out about this because most of us have lost the ability to distinguish between general principles and political outcomes. So long as the "right" people are being zapped, no one cares._</comment>


Zero Lives Remaining (Alexis Ohanian) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/initialized-capital/zero-lives-remaining-f60e909b5d6a <comment><USER2> I wish I could work at Reddit. Writing bots to help people communicate in a ranked forum sounds fun.</comment>


Ask HN: Best resources for learning Julia? - <AUTHOR> Julia have just released v1.0, and I would like to try it out! (https://julialang.org/)<p>Usually I use Python for scientific computing, and find it good for machine learning, and I know some R/Stan which I find better for Bayesian statistics. I'm hoping Julia will be the best of both, but the homepage doesn't have great resources for getting started - any recommendations? <comment><USER2> I run a workshop series specifically for this demographic and the notes are online:

[http://ucidatascienceinitiative.github.io/IntroToJulia/](http://ucidatascienceinitiative.github.io/IntroToJulia/)

It's mostly problem-based. I hope that by showing you a manual, some resources I like to use, some problems, and then some high level discussions you can get up and working in no time. Sources for "how to write a function" can be found elsewhere: this resource starts assuming you can read a manual if you know what to search for.

(Note that there are some v1.0 updates still necessary, but most works)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://benlauwens.github.io/ThinkJulia.jl/latest/book.html](https://benlauwens.github.io/ThinkJulia.jl/latest/book.html)

Introduction to Julia - By Jane Herriman [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYW2J2WWkj8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYW2J2WWkj8)

Quick view of Julia in one program: [https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/julia/](https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/julia/)

Working with data using Julia - [https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2017/10/comprehensive-t...](https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2017/10/comprehensive- tutorial-learn-data-science-julia-from-scratch/)

Rest of Julia tutorials in one-place: [https://julialang.org/learning/](https://julialang.org/learning/)</comment>


Stolen Tesla Crashes, Splits in Half in Fiery Multi-Car Wreck - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Stolen-Tesla-High-Speed-Chase-Fiery-Crash-in-West-Hollywood-265813821.html <comment><USER2> Summary: some jackhole was going 100 miles per hour and hit a honda carrying 5 people, then struck a pole which cut the car in half. Half of it stuck in a building, and the other half of the tesla caught on fire.

This has nothing to do with Tesla and EV fire concerns. Try doing this with an internal combustion engine car and see what happens.

<comment><USER3> > This has nothing to do with Tesla and EV fire concerns.

Exactly. There was a rash a year or two ago of idiots wrecking their high end sports cars, splitting them in half (and usually killing themselves in the process). The focus of those articles was on the driver and not the car (the titles reflected it too).

Curious that he managed to "significantly damage at least four vehicles." That should be a testament to the Tesla's build quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If it wasn't a Tesla, it would just say "Stolen car". Why is the article so focused on it being a Tesla?

<comment><USER2> Because it's a TESLA and they're dangerous!! (sarcasm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, the driver (thief) appears to have survived (even if in critical condition at the hospital)?

Not sure if that's an endorsement of the Tesla's safety, quality of EMS in LA, or billions of years of evolution, but I wouldn't expect someone to survive an accident like that.

<comment><USER6> The car split in half and the driver was ejected. It would be very difficult to make a case that the driver survived on the merits of the Model S's safety features. That is not an indictment of the Model S, however.

Automobiles are engineered for safety within an expected operating envelope. Automobile safety engineering is a compromise of three factors cost, weight, and safety. Tesla goes above and beyond in their engineering of their safety features, but they still target an operating envelope that is sane. The forces involved in a car accident increase rapidly with speed, so the compromises involved fail hard when you push well outside the envelope.

What is an operating envelope, exactly? Roadway speed limits are (ideally) set based on conditions. Things like the number of side streets, shoulder clearances, road quality, and even the design of road infrastructure (like guardrails) are taken in to consideration. Interstates are the only environment where an automobile should exceed 55 MPH (if you're obeying traffic laws). Roadside obstructions on an interstate are designed with this in mind. City streets are not. When you drive within the confines of traffic laws, you're within the operating envelope. Exceed these parameters, and you're pushing in to territory that was not explicitly considered when engineering the car.

Put more simply, there is no testing standard for impact with telephone poles at >55 MPH because that is never an expected outcome for accidents where operators are driving within an expected operating envelope.

<comment><USER7> I would be surprised if they actually use 55 mph as the cutoff, I would think they look at driving behavior rather than the legal limits, and the effective max speed in many areas is 60 or 65 mph.

It's also the case that states with a lot of rural roads have speed limits, on undivided highways, higher than 55 mph (Wikipedia seems to be fairly comprehensive on this topic: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Stat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_States) ).

<comment><USER6> Surprise! :) The bar is (literally, not figuratively) set by the crash test regulations in a given market. In the US, this is the NHTSA.

In the incident outlined in the article, the driver struck a pole orientated (roughly) perpendicular to the direction of travel. The testing standard for this type of impact is currently 20 MPH[1]. Why 20 MPH? Because, as you suggested, research [2] indicates that most accidents involving fixed poles don't occur at high speeds. Roadside hardware present on highways are designed to crumple and absorb impact, or are situated such that they would deflect the car, rather than cause it to stop abruptly. Yes, you can find exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptions, and would be considered a deficiency to be resolved, not an engineering standard.

Tesla exceeded the required criteria for this test by a sizable margin, but you've got to look at the physics of kinetic energy to understand why anything above 55 MPH is still wildly outside of the range considered in the safety engineering of the car.

In a crash, the kinetic energy of the vehicle must be dissipated somehow. This energy is governed by the formula (1/2)mv^2. The important part of that formula is the velocity-squared portion. The velocity coefficient impacts the kinetic energy as a square. Just have a look at a graph of that function:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2F2%282100x%5E2%29+fr...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2F2%282100x%5E2%29+from+x%3D0+to+55)

As much as I commend Tesla for their safety efforts, when you drive like this guy did, your only ally is dumb luck.

1: [http://www.safercar.gov/Vehicle+Shoppers/5-Star+FAQ#fifteen](http://www.safercar.gov/Vehicle+Shoppers/5-Star+FAQ#fifteen)

2: [http://www.nhtsa.gov/CARS/rules/rulings/SideImpact/index.htm...](http://www.nhtsa.gov/CARS/rules/rulings/SideImpact/index.html)

<comment><USER7> My point was more that if they are doing some design calculation, they aren't just going to plug 55 mph into the front of that calculation, they are going to use some consideration.

Shortly after posting my other reply, I was pondering how worthwhile it was and what prompted me to post it, and I decided that I found the 55 to be overly specific. I haven't changed my mind about that, but I don't see much reason to try to argue about it.

<comment><USER6> Then how do you plain that the car split in half in this incident? If the information presented doesn't change your mind, then maybe you're just more concerned with maintaining your point of view than you are understanding the matter.

<comment><USER7> I suppose the key point is that I over-read _Interstates are the only environment where an automobile should exceed 55 MPH (if you 're obeying traffic laws)._ (which is simply not true) and looked past _there is no testing standard_ (which does a nice job of qualifying what you were saying).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So EVs are good enough for Los Angeles high speed chases now... does this mean they've finally arrived?

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what would've happened if Tesla both had the ability to remotely shut the car down AND then shut it down in compliance with the police involved. Less people would be hurt, a synagogue would not have those damages, a whole lot of people with less stress.

Precedent from 2009 with OnStar: [http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/10/onstar- gp...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/10/onstar-gps- carjacking.html)

<comment><USER10> i wonder if its safe to shut down or slow down a vehicle remotely because speed & approach judgements are best left to drivers of the vehicle unless of- course its remotely driven.

<comment><USER11> Probably dangerous, but probably safer than a high-speed chase.

<comment><USER10> Yes you are right , for the resultant set of safe times and coordinates to slow-down/shutdown should be algorithmic derivations; given fast computing and enough data-gathering.But am wondering if modern GPS remote mechanisms do these ?

<comment><USER11> It seems like you could probably do pretty well by 1) alerting the driver, and 2) gradually reducing the max speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Real criminal genius - steals a car that is constantly connected to the mothership and can't be chopped up for parts (hardly think there could be a market for that).

</comment><comment><USER13> Why was there a high speed chase, anyways? Don't most police departments have rules that high speed chases should only proceed when lives are endangered?

</comment><comment><USER14> I've seen plenty of pictures on the internet of supercars sliced in half and burned after crashes at that kind of speed. For example the Paul Walker crash. From the picture of the Honda I assume the Tesla broadsides the Honda whiched caused it to spin, slide, and strike the pole.

</comment><comment><USER15> It would be great for Tesla if first person to die in a Model S was a car thief.

Someone is going to be the first. Lets hope is not a child :S

</comment><comment><USER16> This reeks of a smear campaign for Tesla Automobiles. A regular petrol car would have exploded and hurt much more people.

<comment><USER12> If anything this could be an involuntary ad for Tesla's safety, since the driver survived.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why was this even posted to HN?

<comment><USER10> keyword 'Tesla'</comment></comment>


7chan - <AUTHOR> https://7chan.org/ <comment><USER2> So I looked at the linked page. I see that there's some news. I see that it's a "chan," although I don't know if it's new, or old and absorbing refugees.

But fundamentally, I don't get what it _is_.

Please explain it like I'm 62.

<comment><AUTHOR> 4chan started out in fame, as the incubator for anonymous, then things happened and groups splintered off to make thier own "sub board" . 7chan and 8 chan were a couple of these. now that 8chan is gone the users of 8chan are regrouping in familiar places, 7chan is one of them. 7chan has stikkied a no tolerance policy for the stuff that was happening in 8chan.org/pol/

what is an image board? not all image "chanboards' are like this but lax rules and ephemeral postings cause problems. its a lot like HN except it is the norm to post images with comments, usually heavy on the image side as a non text method of communicating like using emogis. very often memes, and in 4chan/b/, unseemly images of the most extreme sorts. its the sort of place that HN wants to be as opposite as possible regarding the toxicity hostility and open endorsement of crime as a gallows humour, [mostly] so the problem is people are constantly amplifiying antisocial[to say the least] sentiments and do serious damage to peoples psyches over long term.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Believe it or not, I had to look up "stikkied," which led me to encyclopediadramatica, and now I know that I don't want the chans. I do wish that I had the free time that those people seem to have.

<comment><AUTHOR> when you have a rolling blog like HN or a chan or pastebin each post gets stale older and demotes until it falls off "the end" of the thread and selfdestructs.

stikkies are an admins/mods announcement and stay on top and are immortal so all can read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> there are a number of splinter boards from 4chan.

looking at thier stickkies, i see that links to discord servers are problems for them.

there is a list of chan like boards to peek around in, to see where the breadcrumbs lead

[https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/List_of_*chan_boards](https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/List_of_*chan_boards)

</comment><comment><USER3> Go lucky 7? Is this like Vegas? Double or nothing?

<comment><AUTHOR> a splinter board but im very sure this is one of the places they retreated to.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> they are still around, there is a place for them to go there should be no place for the wicked to rest and lick thier wounds.</comment>


Ask HN: Largest known MSSQL installation? - <AUTHOR>

Having read the great article on MySQL at Facebook, I wonder how MSSQL performs in the wild. At my dayjob that's the one component I cannot get my employer to consider FOSS.
Does anyone know the througput of the largest MSSQL installation? When I search the web, I can't find anything that compares to the MySQL article. Maybe that's because banks and insurers don't like to disclose this kind of information.
But I keep wondering if those businesses even have the same throughput as Facebook. <comment><USER2> I think MySpace still qualifies as large -- perhaps not as large as at its peak, but the peak number is all that should matter...

<http://highscalability.com/myspace-architecture></comment>


Huawei laptop 'backdoor' flaw concerns - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47800000 <comment><USER2> Is there any more information as to what this backdoor was?

The article mentions the University of Surrey but also unnamed Microsoft Researchers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe this link will help: [https://www.theepochtimes.com/microsoft-finds- backdoor-in-hu...](https://www.theepochtimes.com/microsoft-finds-backdoor-in- huawei-laptops-that-could-give-hackers-access_2863926.html)</comment></comment>


If nearly 40% of Americans aren't working, what are they doing? (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/516023/if-nearly-40-of-americans-arent-working-what-are-they-doing/ <comment><USER4> In case people wonder, the pre covid employment figure was around 60% for working age people in the USA.

[https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment- rate#:...](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment- rate#:~:text=Employment%20Rate%20in%20the%20United%20States%20averaged%2059.24%20percent%20from,percent%20in%20April%20of%202020).

I bring this up every time people discuss working week length, productivity etc. We have massively reduced the percentage of people working. But instead of giving everyone 2 extra days off, we gave 40% of people all the days off and made the rest work harder...

<comment><USER5> I can't wait until we get enough Millenials in power to peg the retirement age to life expectancy.

<comment><USER6> As a millenial. I'd much rather just have a 3.5 day working week.

<comment><USER7> We already have that for most jobs, especially in software. You just have to pretend to work the other 1.5.

<comment><USER8> I've always found it much more challenging to pretend to work than to just work.

<comment><USER7> I agree. Fortunately, now that most are working from home, pretending is much easier.

<comment><USER9> And easier to be qualified to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My pet theory is that labor force participation declines and "automation" go hand in hand across all industries.

Automation isn't robots it's what used to be a 10 person marketing team doing the same amount of work but being more productive as they're all much more cross skilled and have more tools at their fingertips.

Same with some aspects of dev/operation. Same with some aspects of legal. Same with some aspects of medical/surgery.

The net result is that you end up with more roles that are senior level and less opportunities for entry level.

<comment><USER11> I agree. I think the coming change is much bigger than anyone is prepared to handle..

We are in a transitional period - the utopian endpoint of technology was always to perfect/automate so much that there is no need for humans to work (except on what you want to of course), but as we get closer we have no idea what society is supposed to look like in that world.

Politicians still promise jobs, the Fed targets employment, the entirety of society is built around the idea of working to make a living. Those ideas don't even necessarily make sense in a world of increasing automation - <USER2> some point if everything keeps getting 10x more efficient, there simply won't be enough jobs of any kind to go around.

It means a transition to an entirely different way of organizing society - <USER3> don't know what it will look like and its going to be a very bumpy ride.

<comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For the older cohorts, isn't it possible people are doing informal work and not reporting it?

As for the younger cohorts, it used to be a thing that you'd work a bit in order to build up your CV. These days, it seems like a lot of things that you could do simply don't count towards a career anymore, there's been a cultural shift where many hiring managers don't buy that a job in another industry helps much. Waiting tables used to be a just fine way to show you were able to work, now you need an internship in a bank or you may as well not bother. Same with many other professions.

</comment><comment><USER14> Little known fact on unemployment:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#Limitations_of_de...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#Limitations_of_definition)

"For the fourth quarter of 2004, according to OECD (Employment Outlook 2005 ISBN 92-64-01045-9), normalized unemployment for men aged 25 to 54 was 4.6% in the US and 7.4% in France. At the same time and for the same population, the employment rate (number of workers divided by population) was 86.3% in the US and 86.7% in France. That example shows that the unemployment rate was 60% higher in France than in the US, but more people in that demographic were working in France than in the US, which is counterintuitive if it is expected that the unemployment rate reflects the health of the labour market."

More unemployment by the official measure (normalized OECD) but ... more people working relative to given population.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure this is that unintuitive once you know what unemployment means technically: the key aspect of the definition of unemployment is that to be unemployed you have to be actively searching for work. If more of your population is actively searching for work, as opposed to less, it stands to reason that more people might eventually find work.

<comment><USER14> Then you may have to question "lower unemployment is better": for example is the explanation for the France/USA unemployment difference that more USA people have completely given hope of finding a work and are rejected by society?

In the media it's always "super high unemployment in old Europe, super good low unemployment in the USA".

<comment><USER15> My hunch is that the USA has low employment due to its terrible healthcare for poor people; I get the impression that people there get sick and then fall out of the labour market permanently.

I think we may be consuming different media. The narrative I hear is (prepandemic) "the UK has record low unemployment but this is bad because it is low quality work with high underemployment".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> FYI, this article is 5 years old.

<comment><USER17> In other words, it's probably much worse now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Some of the decline represents a positive trend: young people getting more eduction [sic]."

A particularly unfortunate spot in the article for the editor to have missed a misspelling. Even in 2015, surely they had spellcheck?

<comment><USER17> > _Even in 2015, surely they had spellcheck?_

Well, eduction is a word, so it would have spelled ok.

<comment><USER18> Aha! I have learned something today! Although, in this case, I'm pretty sure they meant education, unless this is some sort of very subtle metaphor. But yeah, spellcheck would not know that, you're right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They are collecting disability insurance.

[https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/briefing- papers/bp2019-01.ht...](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/briefing- papers/bp2019-01.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> 56% of US population was not working in July 2020 according to BLS numbers. US population is 328M. 144M are working civilians. Add 2M for military employment. 44% employment rate.

<comment><USER20> Note in the last election a couple of candidates would have said the the US unemployment rate was 56%, not 11%. They counted everyone who wasnt working as unemployed, including 1 year olds and 90 year olds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I haven't had a job in over 2 years. What I do:

\- building an algorithmic trading bot

\- play video games, mostly strategy with a few RPGs and platformers

\- exercise for 30 min - 1 hour every day

\- do all my own cooking, house work, take on DIY projects

\- read books, mostly fantasy, sci-fi and science text books for pleasure

I'm much, much happier than when I was employed as a software engineer. I highly recommend people to save money and leave the workforce and instead live a life of leisure as a capitalist and independent scientist.

<comment><USER22> How do you plan to get back to work-force after the money you saved up run dry?

Majority of software engineers are able to save up for few years forth of expenses by not going into any major investments.

To give an example - I can stop working for 3 years now, but Ill have huge issues explaining that afterwards. And if I plan to build a house - there is no option for me to stop working for the next 10 years.

Not everyone is in so proviliged place.

<comment><USER21> I'm very frugal, it would be difficult for my stash to be depleted. My conservative long term investments provide more than enough cash flow for my basic necessities - I only put extra in the algo for now, though the algo is less volatile so far than my long term investments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My guess: a huge part of the 40% are children

<comment><USER24> The labor force participation rate is a measure of an economy's active workforce. The formula for the number is the sum of all workers who are employed or actively seeking employment divided by the total noninstitutionalized, civilian _working-age_ population.

<comment><USER25> Children are excluded, but the elderly are not. Prime-age (25-54) employment rates are quite a bit higher than 60%.

<comment><USER26> Pre Covid prime age employment rates were 80% or so. The remainder is mostly stay at home moms and grad students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Vibing.

If this whole meditation trend reaches its logical conclusion, you'll understand.</comment>


Amazon to Pay $500M in Bonuses for Front-Line Workers, Delivery Partners - tech-historian https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-pay-500-million-in-bonuses-for-front-line-workers-delivery-partners-11593441752 <comment><AUTHOR> Some numbers to put this into perspective:

A $500 bonus for one month of full time 40/hr/week work comes out to ~$3.20/hr "raise" for the month of June. Amazon minimum pay is $15/hr, so this bonus is effectively a ~20% raise for one month.

Amazon Q1 profits were $2.5 billion, or ~$620 million averaged per month. Spending $500 million on this bonus is ~80% of "monthly" profits.

This is a situation where I suppose I do have to give props to Amazon for giving a bonus that's well above the status quo (a 20% raise and spending 80% of profits on pay raises is nothing to sneeze at), but at the same time, $500 still seems paltry.

</comment><comment> tech-historian Details: "Full-time employees at Amazon, its Whole Foods Market business and drivers in its contracted delivery program will receive $500, while those in part-time positions will receive $250, Mr. Clark said.

Leaders at Amazon and Whole Foods will receive a $1,000 bonus, and owners running contracted delivery-service operations will get $3,000, he said. Amazon will also pay $150 to some drivers working through another one of the company's initiatives."</comment>


Evolving the Dropbox Brand - <AUTHOR> https://dropbox.design/ <comment><USER2> Wow. that is (from my perspective - but only mine) terrible.

Janky scrolling, things flying around, random animations that don't finish before you scroll past them.

The left / right alternate scroll is .... unsettling.

<comment><USER3> I thought something was wrong with my browser because it wouldn't scroll. How does a company with this much money fail so hard at web design?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I get the metaphor and all, but I found this statement to be pretty over-the- top:

> Our old logo was a blue box that implied, "Dropbox is a great place to store > stuff." The new one is cleaner and simpler. And we've evolved it from a > literal box, to a collection of surfaces to show that Dropbox is an open > platform, and a place for creation.

Maybe this is just an intermediate step in an attempt to preserve some brand continuity, and something more radically different is coming later, but the new logo sure looks a lot like a blue box to me. I literally didn't realize the logo next to this text was the new logo, I kept scrolling down looking for something that wasn't clearly a box.

I actually agree that the new logo is an improvement -- it really is "cleaner and simpler" \-- but I think it is ridiculous to look at that new logo as anything more than (or other than) a stylized box.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not sure I understand the strategy here, was under the impression that Dropbox wanted to move further into the enterprise (read:lucrative) space which would favor a constant, subtle, and functional "boring" scheme.

This seems like a tear in the opposite direction and I'm not sure which target user/market it was designed to appeal to. Maybe it's just a refresh to try and stay top-of-mind in the face of competition from Google, Microsoft, and Box.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the worst UX I've seen in a long time. Not only that, it's visually garish. Apparently the designers at Dropbox have never heard of color theory.

<comment><USER7> My initial impression was they were intentionally breaking color theory rules, maybe as a way to stand out. It gives off a trendy, hipster vibe. I can't imagine this aesthetic aging well.

<comment><USER8> it gives me a 'geocities' vibe.

<comment><USER9> It give me a "I just discovered LSD" vibe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My response to this site as someone who has had a paid Dropbox account for years:

Oh no. Oh... no. _follow link to dropbox.com_ Ugh. What happened?

I'm now under the impression Dropbox will go out of business and I need to explore alternatives.

Edit: I think I identified what makes me intensely dislike it. The color scheme and design screams "This is no longer for you, it's for hipsters."

</comment><comment><USER11> I see what they wanted to do, but I think they misjudged their users. The non design oriented people using this will probably think that this is horrible - which it is (for this purpose). This kind of playful and color heavy design isn't new or bad, it's just that it has a really hard time breaking out of the art/design magazine area. It's impractical, forces the user to look extra hard, uses non-traditional color combinations with weird contrasts. Whoever greenlit this made a mistake.

<comment><USER12> We don't know how the UI will look, which is what matters. Of course the design announcement will be over-designed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That typeface is just dreadful. Dropbox is a utilitarian business product, not a mid-century art exhibit.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, the text is really weird, I had a hard time reading any of it. The letters just seem too wide, out of proportion. I almost wonder if I have an extension blocking some adaptive-text-resizing script or something, because it doesn't seem like they'd actually want it to look that way...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> They have posted some additional information on their blog: [https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2017/10/creative-energy- ke...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2017/10/creative-energy-keep-it- flowing/)

You can see the new frontpage here: [https://www.dropbox.com/allyours](https://www.dropbox.com/allyours)

<comment><USER16> > That's why today we're excited to tell...

I always perceive words like "excited" in PR statements as corporate narcissism. This kind of language shows that they have become too self- absorbed, the new unfitting design is just another symptom of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems very similar to Spotify's recent-ish rebranding. Which makes sense as the same agency appears to have worked on it [https://www.wearecollins.com/work/spotify/](https://www.wearecollins.com/work/spotify/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, that scrolling is a trainwreck

<comment><USER19> Yup. This is what it looks like in Safari: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYPWaKHmAhE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYPWaKHmAhE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This reminds me of the time I watched the video about Uber's new logo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx1-im6i8uk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx1-im6i8uk)

Seriously, who comes up with this stuff? It feels like a bad joke.

</comment><comment><USER12> Everyone is dumping on this, but I, for one, applaud their daring to try something that doesn't look like every other SaaS brand out there. (And besides, Box.com already beat them to that.)

</comment><comment><USER21> It's probably totally subjective but I find the typeface needlessly "wide" and the colour palette unpleasant - especially that dark red and cyan combination in the new homepage [1]. It has some sort of retro Microsoft Frontpage '97 vibe.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/rcZxsLs.png](https://i.imgur.com/rcZxsLs.png)

</comment><comment><USER22> It's like they switched from RGB to HSB colors without actually changing any of the values.

Also, [do unnecessary scrolling tricks justify _requiring_ JavaScript?]([https://i.imgur.com/9mVzkaY.png](https://i.imgur.com/9mVzkaY.png))

</comment><comment><USER19> Let's hope this brand evolution is better engineered than the web page that's announcing it. The scrolling is appalling [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYPWaKHmAhE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYPWaKHmAhE)

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks stylish and artistic. Not exactly what I usually think of when I think of Dropbox. I use them mostly cause they're the most reliable cloud storage method I've tried. But looks nice to me.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is just so sad. I've used, paid for, and loved Dropbox for years and years. It is really worrying that anyone in the company felt it was OK to launch this rebrand.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Hello, this is Sharp Grotesk

They nailed it on grotesk

</comment><comment><USER26> This makes me sad. I can barely read that new typeface. If I were on the market for a files backup solution, I'd want the product to communicate robustness and reliability. This combination of whimsy and the site simply not working sends a bad signal.

</comment><comment><USER27> I haven't looked into details, but the presentation looks pretty garish. I think the best thing about Dropbox is that you don't notice it. It just works. A garish, attention-grabbing logo is the exact opposite of what Dropbox should represent.

</comment><comment><USER28> What is this nightmare? Neither the Space bar, Down Arrow or Page Down keys are working on this page in Firefox. I don't see the scrollbar either, so I cannot guess how much will I have to scroll using the [sigh] mousewheel.

</comment><comment><USER29> this has to be the worst website i've been on since 1997

double scroll bars? I can't scroll by clicking? all kinds of colors that don't work, i'm so confused right now i'll just pretend it didnt exist..

</comment><comment><USER30> Urgh, gross. Visual vomit — totally impractical and communicates nothing.

</comment><comment><USER31> Who approved this?

</comment><comment><USER32> Uhhh, did they only change the logo? Did they come out with a new product, or alter Dropbox's functionality?

I really don't understand what this is all about.

</comment><comment><USER33> Wow, this is truly terrible. Those colors are godawful.

</comment><comment><USER34> I see what they're trying to do, but feel like it went horribly wrong at some point and got forced into beeing a lifestyle magazine...

</comment><comment><USER7> It's almost like they used a random color palette generator. The colors they chose look entirely random to my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow, that broke my browser (chrome, no less). I love innovative UX, but multiple internal scrollbars, a <noscript> tag that shows up as text at the bottom of the page, hijacked and then broken scrolling. Looks more like a college web design project than something that would come out of a top web company... yikes.

</comment><comment><USER36> I was truly convinced that this must be a third party joke, but it appears Dropbox really does own dropbox.design.

</comment><comment><USER37> If this becomes the new trend in design, I might have to get out of the business.

</comment><comment><USER38> Looks like they are modifying the site to fix some of the complaints here. It doesn't seem to have two scrolling areas and standard keyboard navigation seems to work.

The colors and typography are still hideous, though.

</comment><comment><USER39> The scroll on the page is a terrible idea. I was under the impression the page has a problem, with the delay between the left/right pane, until I realized it was intentional ...

</comment><comment><USER40> very bad ux on this one

<comment><USER41> agreed. the scrolling is awful and the text placement and sizing is weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app." No thanks, there're exactly zero reasons to have webpage like this JS only.

</comment><comment><USER43> There are two scrollbars, and both of them don't work!

The left one doesn't scroll, the right one reveals some weird script tag.

</comment><comment><USER44> Omg the site is so jerky in desktop Safari.

<comment><USER45> It's also similarly bad on iPad mobile Safari, actually making me feel a bit sick...

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> What are fellow HN'ers using for file sync/sharing? I was a Dropbox early adopter but haven't been as impressed as of late, with Dropbox suddenly trying to integrate into my MS Office apps and trying to upload my screenshots and photos.

I'm not a huge fan of Google Drive's recent redesign either. I like box.com but haven't moved anything yet.

<comment><USER47> Resilio Sync, although I'm not necessarily advocating for it. It's nice to have an option where nothing is in "the cloud".

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is godawful rainbow design the new thing now? First Mozilla, and now Dropbox?

</comment><comment><USER49> I get two scrollbars. First time I've seen that.

</comment><comment><USER50> very spotify-ish

</comment><comment><USER51> Why is this marked as a duplicate? It seems to be the only post from this url, and the only post with the phrase "dropbox brand"

</comment><comment><USER52> The old dropbox for me had a spectacular unique design and i really loved it. The design of the file browser before the previous one was imho the best.

I feel like this is a huge step backwards and if the seamless experience of using dropbox worsens i will consider switching. But then again i am not a paying customer.

</comment><comment><USER53> The jerky scrolling on that page isn't pleasant.

</comment><comment><USER54> This shouldn't be marked as a dupe. It's a new redesign.</comment>


JPMorgan Chase CEO denounces bitcoin as 'terrible,' predicts its downfall - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/usa/chase-ceo-bitcoin-terrible-downfall-100/

<comment><USER2> Most people don't use currency to store value. Their value is stored in stocks (not bonds) retirement plans, real estate, gold. Those instruments have value independent of currency. They do keep some petty cash stored in a bank, virtualized, lent out for others to use.

</comment><comment><USER3> It doesn't surprise me that he predicts the downfall of bitcoin. A more apt description is that he HOPES for the downfall of bitcoin and all other crytocurrencies as it means that banks will lose a ton of business and control of the money.</comment>


Front-End Checklist - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thedaviddias/Front-End-Checklist <comment><USER2> > Alternative text: High All  have an alternative text which describe the > image visually.

Please don't do that. Don't put an alt on ALL images. Screen readers will read all of them. Skin and flavour images don't deserve to be read outloud. Nobody wants to hear "bottom left corner of logo" or "rounded corner".

<comment><USER3> This recommendation would be fine 20 years ago. You should not have any decorative images in your markup, they belong to CSS.

<comment><USER2> Agreed but it does happen. Sometimes, the line between content and decorative it pretty thin.

Should you add an alt to a stock photo?

Should you disturb a user with a reading of "stock photo of a business man smiling" next to a sales paragraph? What about "sunset over a mountain" on a page for a SaaS website?

<comment><USER4> Some people disagree but I think most say the stock photos should have alternative text. The photo is there for a reason, to convey something, and the text should indicate that (though usually not explicitly). Usually you don't use "photo" in alt text, the assistive technology will announce "image" with the text, and usually you don't want to call attention to the fact that an image is a stock photo. "Businessman smiling" or "smiling man in suit" would probably be good. You might add some adjectives that help convey why the image was used, "peaceful sunset over mountain."

The goal is not so much to make the best experience for the assistive technology user but to provide as close to the same experience as possible, bullshit marketing crap and all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note that you don't actually need the head or body tags in your page. The browser already knows what is allowed in the head. It looks weird at first, but you can write your html like so:

      <!doctype html>

      <title>My Title</title>

Also note that the html tag can also be omitted, unless you need to set the language. Don't worry about closing it either.

<comment><USER6> Edit: my original comment (retained below) is wrong about this being malformed, and it's completely valid. Some more info here: [https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#optional-...](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#optional- tags)

\---

 _Original comment_ :

The fact that browsers are _able_ to handle malformed HTML doesn't mean that you should do it that way. There's no meaningful benefit that I can think of, and the potential to break a ton of things that aren't as lenient.

<comment><USER7> My understanding is that it is not malformed, but actually a part of the spec. Maybe someone else has a link to the appropriate part of the spec, but following someone else's link to the spec and reading it for myself is how I learned that it is not malformed.

<comment><USER8> >Tag omission in text/html:

>An html element's start tag can be omitted if the first thing inside the html element is not a comment.

>An html element's end tag can be omitted if the html element is not immediately followed by a comment.

[https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/semantics.html#the-html- element](https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/semantics.html#the-html-element)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These are very subjective, I've never done half of the 'high' priority items, and I've never had any issues with my site having a 'disfunction'. Take this list with a gigantic grain of salt.

For example, your site certainly won't break from missing the 'lang' attribute.

<comment><USER10> No. But e.g. automated translation now needs to guess your language, and that's... not always successful. Screenreaders will need to guess the language to pronounce properly. Search engines will have to infer the language. And so on.

Your site isn't "broken", per se, but it's not as high quality as it could be.

<comment><USER11> I wonder how much lang=en can actually be trusted—enough things put it in by default that I can easily imagine its presence on non-English pages.

 _Update:_ from elsewhere on this thread, Google ignores :

> But the language attribute within the HTML markup is something we don't use > at all. We've found that this language markup is something that is almost > always wrong. So we tend to ignore that.

[https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ignores-the-html-lang- at...](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ignores-the-html-lang- attribute-22974.html)

<comment><USER10> It tends to be more reliable if it's not lang=en. The cargo culting nature of web development makes some things a bit painful.

FWIW, Chrome's translate feature does care about lang=. Or at least it did last time I checked.

It's one of the things that has no downside, and a small upside. If you leave it out, your site isn't horribly broken. People will always get the content, but tools that process the content might be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems like this could be presented without as much clutter. Not really useful at a glance for a checklist. Also, some of the info isn't well researched and lacks citations for claims as others have mentioned.

One would be better off just using the Google Web Starter kit[1], other boilerplate options, or just chrome dev tools running Audits to get started with a solid front-end.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/web/tools/starter- kit/](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/starter-kit/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Following this list is a great way to never launch something into production.

<comment><USER14> Just keep a boilerplate handy

I've helped a friend to publish a one-page website over the weekend, and I believe it follows most of this checklist

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This would be a good checklist for anyone considering building a UI framework. This kind of thing is the reason Bootstrap & friends are so large - they do a lot for you.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't help but notice there's no "Security" section. Perhaps by the time you've got the HTML rendering it's too late, but SRI tags, CSP headers and whatnot all deserve some mention.

[https://github.com/thedaviddias/Front-End- Checklist/issues/2...](https://github.com/thedaviddias/Front-End- Checklist/issues/23)

</comment><comment><USER17> > All  have height and width set (Don't specify px or %)

So what unit should be used?

<comment><USER18> None, image height and width attributes don't have the unit included.

(They generally assume these values are in pixels by default[1])

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/im...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/img)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Awesome list, I always forget about several things on here it's going to be nice to have a reference to prevent that from happening.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's a better checklist: Run a W3 validator on your HTML, fix the red stuff that isn't too annoying to fix. Launch. Deal with all that other stuff later.

</comment><comment><USER21>  \- High?

why?

<comment><USER22> I also found that odd. I've always placed mine in the HTML tag.

tough, I don't know what the difference is.

<comment><USER23> Putting it on  is better as that defines the language for <title> as well. The lang attribute defines the language of the tree that the element is the root node of.

<comment><USER21> still, who uses it for what? browsers dont change behaviour because of it, search engines ignore it, users dont see it.

<comment><USER23> 1\. The main reason is screen readers. Imagine a screen reader trying to pronounce 'Je ne regrette rien' with an English voice, then imagine the same with a French voice.

2\. I'd be surprised if search engines didn't use it at least as a flag for content language (although I'm sure that it's only supplemental at best).

3\. Styling based on language. CSS has a :lang() pseudoclass selector so you can do p:lang(en) { color: red; } p:lang(fr) { color: blue; } . Or tie quote styles to language based on generated content. Or most usefully adjust font metrics based on language for multilingual sites (typically you'd want to boost the font size a little for Chinese or Japanese as there are less characters for same information, but each character is a little more dense).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> >Pixel perfect: High Pages are close to pixel perfect. Depending on the quality of the creatives, you may not be 100% accurate, but your page needs to be close to your template.

What is this 2004?

</comment><comment><USER25> An oft overstated thing -- but the organization of CSS is currently being massaged by the front end community, and in-line CSS is no longer considered an awful thing with Radium and others.

</comment><comment><USER26> I love the [http://webdevchecklist.com/](http://webdevchecklist.com/) site.

</comment><comment><USER27> Pixel perfection, are we still striving for that?

</comment><comment><USER28> Are sitemaps still a thing that really matters?

<comment><USER29> Don't you wanna get crawled?

<comment><USER28> Have not found the crawl rates changed for sites where everything is well linked together. Then again, these have been just small sites with a few million pages.

<comment><USER21> measurability

crawling != indexing

with a segmented sitemap (i.e.: one per pagetype, per namespace, ..) you get important communicated to indexed ratios you otherwise do not get.

if crawling and indexing works, it works but if it doesn't you should know it (see it in google search console) and debug it (narrow it down via segmented sitemaps).

<comment><USER30> Curious if you have examples of the types of sitemaps you mentioned: segmentation, namespacing, one per pagetype etc. and the reasoning behind the variations.

<comment><USER21> i.e.: tourradar.com/robots.txt

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What about back-end? Should be nice have one

<comment><USER32> OWASP guidelines are a good start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's already missing iPhone X support.

<comment><USER33> It will be interesting to find what the visitor percentages are for iPhone x.

Even though its Apple, at some point its not worth spending the time and money.

<comment><USER29> The iPhone X will be sold out everywhere until 2018.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What would be a great idea is an app that scans for the presence of these conditions.

<comment><USER35> If anyone wants to have a crack at it, you can use Page.REST to build it. If not I might be able to get to it towards next week :)</comment></comment>


RSA – Beginning of the end? - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rsa-beginning-end-william-buchanan <comment><AUTHOR> He's a cryptography expert, but is this relevant? Factoring 96-bit primes (faster than before) is hardly the beginning of the end of 2048-bit RSA? Or am I missing something

<comment><USER2> Is he though? He publishes frequently in a bunch of journals that I've never heard of but an actual cryptography expert would know that it is the asymptotic behaviour of an algorithm that matters.

You could write exactly the same post even if the only algorithm you had for factorization was trial division. You just would need to tweak the totally arbitrary cutoff point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Over his prime... ;-) Thanks for confirming that</comment></comment></comment>


What is the worst programming language you ever worked with? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/961942/what-is-the-worst-programming-language-you-ever-worked-with

<comment><USER2> Without question, MUMPS is the worst programming language in active commercial use.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had to do some work with TCL in grad school and hated it quite a bit.</comment>


Slang: language mechanisms for extensible real-time shading systems (2018) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/slang/he18_slang.pdf <comment><USER2> Not to be confused with [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Lang](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Lang)

<comment><USER3> Or [http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/slang](http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/slang)

<comment><USER4> Or the other Slang [https://www.cnbc.com/id/38584613](https://www.cnbc.com/id/38584613)

If you think you've come up with a witty new name for a language, someone else probably already has.

<comment><USER5> Still waiting for Mr. Poopybutthole[0] to become a programming language.

[0]: [https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Poopybutthole](https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Poopybutthole)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Slang compiler is OSS (MIT) and is under active development here...

[https://github.com/shader-slang/slang](https://github.com/shader-slang/slang)

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought this was supposed to be a joke. The title would have worked well as:

Slang: language mechanisms for extensible real-time _trading_ systems</comment>


Elon Musk can 'stick his submarine where it hurts', says British caver - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/thai-cave-rescue-elon-musk-mini-submarine-british-driver-tham-luang-vern-unsworth-a8447166.html <comment><USER2> I tend to think Musk earnestly believes he can jump into any field and (with his team) revolutionize it over night, rather than this being a PR stunt per se.

<comment><USER3> When your big idea is a square peg for a round hole and you publicize it before you've checked that, the difference is indistinguishable.

"It wouldn't have made the first 50 metres into the cave from the dive start point. Just a PR stunt."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup — IronMoney.com - <AUTHOR> https://ironmoney.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I recently redesigned the pages promoting the website[1], the iOS app[2], and the Mac app[3], in an effort to make it clear what Iron Money is and how it helps you manage your personal finances. I'm looking for any suggestions in how the copy, screenshots, or overall design can be improved. Thanks!

[1] <https://ironmoney.com/> [2] <https://ironmoney.com/ios/> [3] <https://ironmoney.com/mac/>

<comment><USER2> I love the concept, great name too.

I definitely think this kind of service will become standard over the next few years. To the point where one day we'll say "how did we manage without it?". The next generation will say "so you logged onto EACH bank account individually?! How did you keep track?"

I think currently the main issues stopping swathes of customers signing up to such a service is the unknown trust & reliability factors.

Your copy really has to hammer these two points home and these issues have to be the centre of your business.

I think currently your site layout feels a little like a blog and it also has no brand identity yet.

If you do some comparisons between Mint.com and your homepage. Not to copy them but to see how they convey trust etc.

Top half of their page hits you with "FREE" & "EASY" while the second half is mostly a giant padlock & a list of security features. Do a bit of surfing to companies websites that have a trusted reputation & see what key words they are using.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! This is definitely something I overlooked and should add to the homepage, probably as part of the first header or as its own section at the very top.</comment></comment></comment>


Zoom Lets Attackers Steal Windows Credentials, Run Programs via UNC Links - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/zoom-lets-attackers-steal-windows-credentials-run-programs-via-unc-links/ <comment><USER2> I've always thought, Windows should automatically only forward credentials for the local domain, or trusted domains, I don't think that would be difficult to sort and offer good protection.

BUT I don't necessarily blame Zoom for this.</comment>


Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/327 <comment><USER2> Author of the GitHub issue here. I was surprised to see this title, because I thought "holy cow, finally someone else appreciates low input latency" and then I realized it was my issue haha.

By the way, wsltty 3.x also has excellent input latency now too. I've been using it for quite a while now with terminal Vim in WSL and it's about 90% as good as xterm on native Linux in terms of latency. wsltty also has no issues with tmux where as the MS terminal (both old and new) have severe issues with tmux.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for providing the praise to the Windows Terminal team many of us know they deserve, allowing us to just click the thumbs-up response on GitHub.

I truly wish more modern software were capable of reaching this level of latency performance. I understand the response provided by "miniksa" at GitHub, but I don't feel satisfied by it. The maintainers of the frameworks that are described as adding so much latency should make a concerted effort to minimize that latency. We know from experience (see ASP.NET Core) that huge strides can be made in performance (both measured as throughput and latency) and that it is massively rewarding. It requires effort, but the payoffs are real.

I fear computer science is often encumbered by a corrosive culture of "good enough" with respect to performance. We have a lot of baggage and urban myths about performance, from maxims about optimization handed down from the first acolytes of computer science, to modern opinions about UX that over-emphasize simplicity, to a repertoire of clever psychological countermeasures for under- performance such as animation. It's a shame that more people don't appreciate how much more enjoyable computing is when latency is nearly zero.

Obviously orders of magnitude matter. The change from 1000ms to 100ms is more significant than a change from 100ms to 10ms. But we cannot diminish that latter change and we should not accept 100ms as good enough. Improving from 100ms to 10ms is still huge and some of us deeply appreciate it.

<comment><USER4> > I fear computer science is often encumbered by a corrosive culture of "good > enough" with respect to performance. We have a lot of baggage and urban > myths about performance, from maxims about optimization handed down from the > first acolytes of computer science, to modern opinions about UX that over- > emphasize simplicity, to a repertoire of clever psychological > countermeasures for under-performance such as animation. It's a shame that > more people don't appreciate how much more enjoyable computing is when > latency is nearly zero.

I wouldn't blame this on computer science: it's really just a long way of saying you get what you measure. It's not that computer scientists don't care about performance, or that human factors / UX isn't an entire field, but simply that most projects don't set performance goals or prioritize them and unsurprisingly most time is spent on the things which are used to judge someone's job performance.

This is especially true when you see how many issues are shared across teams — in this case talking about Windows it's important to remember that during the Ballmer lost years, Microsoft used stack ranking to force managers to categorize a set fraction of people as low performances and reportedly those rankings heavily favored new features over maintenance improvements. In an environment like that, if the change requires coordination across teams it probably just isn't going to happen unless someone very senior makes it a business priority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The surprising thing here is that this is the _Ubuntu_ terminal. Indeed, each keystroke goes through the input driver, to USER32, through the console code, to the terminal process in question. But then it goes through a virtual input device, across the VM boundary (which, on Windows is a VM exit plus an entry), through the Linux input driver, into dash (or whatever Ubuntu uses these days), and then all the way back out again, and _then_ it gets rendered.

The fact that this whole dance is faster than notepad.exe suggests that Linux is doing pretty well, that MS's hypervisor stack is performing well, and that the fancier MS frameworks are really quite slow.

(To be fair, the GNOME Wayland stack has recently been upgraded from awful to sort-of-decent latency-wise. It's all too easy to design a system where latency wasn't a primary consideration from day 1 and to have a very hard time improving latency after the fact.)

<comment><USER6> I think most of the latency between key press and rendering to screen is in the layout / drawing phase.

Forwarding a few function calls is usually pretty fast, the text layout and rendering part is what is slow. Especially since many UI frameworks don't render individual characters; you may end up redrawing a full line or more for every keystroke. (I only have experience with macOS / Cocoa rendering, and I was surprised how slow it is compared to all other things my code does)

<comment><USER7> All of the actual work can easily happen in under a millisecond. What makes input to screen output slow is anything asynchronous - polling (on the input side, e.g. in the USB protocol itself - USB to PCI uses interrupts!) and waiting for the next frame on the output side. Let's say the console waits for vsync to render its next frame, then the compositor grabs it and renders it in the next frame. That is one frame of gratuitous latency.

<comment><USER2> Then there's also the input lag of your monitor too which is really important.

A lot of monitors have really bad input lag, in the 50-60ms range and it's highly variable. This spec is also not usually listed by the manufacturer either and it's not the same thing as response time which is typically 1-10ms in most modern LCDs.

Your monitor's input lag plays a very big role in how fast key presses are perceived because ultimately what makes something feel fast and snappy requires an end to end measurement of you pressing a key and then your eyeballs being able to register it.

The monitor I picked has about 10-14ms of input lag which is very good compared to the average. That's running at 2560x1440 (60hz) at 1:1 scaling too.

If anyone is interested in that sort of thing, a while back I put together a very detailed post on picking a good monitor for software development at: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor- fo...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-for-software- development)

I still use the same monitor today and I would buy it again today if I were thinking about upgrading. Although I kind of regret writing that blog post now because the monitor is almost twice as expensive today as it was 3 years ago.

<comment><USER8> > Physical size doesn't constitute how much you can fit on a monitor. For > example my mom thinks that a 25" 1080p monitor is going to let her fit more > things on her screen than a 22" 1080p monitor. Don't be my mom!

> The only thing that matters for "fitting more stuff on the screen" is the > resolution of the monitor.

This is only true under the assumption that your eyes have infinite resolution. In the more likely case that they don't, the larger size of the pixels at a higher physical screen size means you need fewer pixels, with the result that you can indeed fit more stuff on the screen at the same resolution.

<comment><USER9> It's not just eye resolution, its how the application is designed. An older WinForms application will have very compact ui and mad information density, but some modern web apps will dedicate an entire 1080p window to display 1 icon and two buttons.

I would say that combined with DPI scaling, his port provides a reasonable rule of thumb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If anyone else is curious about measuring things like this, try the [https://isitsnappy.com/](https://isitsnappy.com/) app on a modern phone.

It's real nice to have some competition for macOS on this front — and especially when it moves out of terminals into related tools like editors (VSCode was close to Terminal.app the last time I measured while e.g. Atom was fully an order of magnitude worse). This is a frictional productivity cost which most people discount because it's not as obvious.

</comment><comment><USER10> I just tried it and I'm blown away and confused: why is Windows Terminal faster in an ubuntu tab (WSL1, in my case) than in a cmd.exe / powershell tab? I mean the exact same terminal window. Three tabs side by side. The ubuntu one is instantaneous and the others have short but noticeable lag.

This really surprises me.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Of course this also means that we have trade offs. We don't support fully > international text like pretty much every other application will. RTL? No go > zone right now. Surrogate pairs and emoji? We're getting there but not there > yet. Indic scripts? Nope.

You could say that a longer version of that answer is "Text Rendering Hates You": [https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates- you/](https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious how alacritty compares to it. The alacritty devs basically consider another terminal app rendering faster than them to be a bug on their part ;-) But it _does_ sound like it would be a good challenge.

<comment><USER2> Alacritty has kind of a lot of input latency, it's noticeably worse than wsltty and the default WSL terminal -- at least back when I checked it a year ago.

I think some work has been done to improve it, but at this point IMO if you're on Windows then wsltty is as good as it gets for a general purpose terminal. If you're on Linux, xterm is top notch.

<comment><USER13> What's top notch on Wayland?

<comment><USER2> I never used Wayland, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Of course this also means that we have trade offs. We don't support fully > international text like pretty much every other application will. RTL? No go > zone right now. Surrogate pairs and emoji? We're getting there but not there > yet. Indic scripts? Nope.

I find it interesting that Even though I don't care about any of the above features, I still pay for them working with text in other applications. They are a constant tax on latency. It would be great if applications had a "ascii" mode and a "full" mode. You can take the performance or the features, but you can't have both.

<comment><USER15> I could be wrong, but I think the payment for one pays for the others. International text is one of those "a large portion of the world wants this" sorts of features. Once you've gotten that, emojis sort of come along for the ride.

<comment><USER16> Emojis add complexity that other scripts don't, mostly in the form of color processing (all other scripts are monochrome!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> WSL terminal is garbage. Here's what irks me:

* I click on the icon and I get a terminal up (nevermind that it doesn't accept focus on startup, so I start typing and the characters keep going to my task bar).

* I type in "clear && ls" and hit enter.

* My line of text vanishes and I'm left with a completely black terminal. If I scroll up with the mouse-wheel I can see what I should have seen (the output of ls).

* I press up (to step backward through my command history) and all the text vanishes again.

The only workaround I have is to run something like tmux, which is somehow smart enough to render the text on-screen.

<comment><USER18> I agree, been trying to make this setup work for over a year now because I use Windows at work for a few things here and there but it's just not worth it really...

You would do much better to install Linux and virtualize windows, then you get the best of both worlds. it's great that windows decided to add a terminal after every other OS has had it for decades but I think this thread is a bit like having rose colored glasses on top of your drunk goggles because WSL and Windows terminal are still an ocean away from a usable low latency terminal environment compared even to OS/2 if we're being brutally honest...

<comment><USER19> Say _what_?

Exactly which release of Windows do you think _didn 't_ supply a terminal?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm a heavy WSL user, ever since I switched to Windows last year (after using MacOS for 6 years, and Linux before that).

I must agree that typing is pretty responsive compared to other windows applications, but still nothing near the native experience. I also run clear linux natively on my laptop, and typing in that terminal is just faster.

</comment><comment><USER21> Qt KTerm, and VTE both supported complex typographies close to 20 years ago and nevertheless achieve similar performance.

It is a testament just how much behind times MS was up until recently.

<comment><USER19> From my perspective though, libVTE performance is terrible. On modern systems it may not be a concern, but on some of my older systems VTE terminals are unusable for any significant throughput of text (while xterm and rxvt run like greased lightning).

While I've never benchmarked them, the original NT console running on that same old hardware feels roughly in the same class as xterm. Per the dev response on the Issue, it sounds as though not too much has changed under the hood. If adding support for such typographies would put it in the same performance class as VTE, I'd consider that a serious regression (at least an order of magnitude).

Or are you saying that the Windows terminal has already regressed that far?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is great to see. My experience with windows in general is that the typing latency is usually very bad compared to ubuntu. I can literally notice the lag. Plus some apps have these awful typing animations which make typing feel like wading through mud.

</comment><comment><USER23> I didn't realize how bad input latency had gotten in general until recently when I needed to boot directly into a terminal. Sometimes I could swear the character appears on the screen before I even hit the key. It's a weird feeling, but I would like more of it.

<comment><USER2> I know the feeling.

A few months ago I was installing Debian on a desktop, and there's this one part during the installer where it prompts you for some information before your desktop is ready to go.

The input processing was so fast it was stupid. It somehow felt even faster than xterm which is already so much better than just about any app on any OS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Long time ago we used RXVT because XTerm and ATerm were both too slow

<comment><USER25> RXVT sucks, but typing on it feels so good that it is what I use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Correct me if I'm wrong but I've been struggling to really nail down my development process of linux software on Windows, and based on my readings, a lot of articles state that applications perform far better on traditional hypervisors like VMWare and VirtualBox than WSL.

I mean it may be great that the WSL terminal feels good, but if my program takes 2-5x slower in WSL for testing, I'm still going to opt for a hypervisor.

</comment><comment><USER27> Related [https://danluu.com/term-latency/](https://danluu.com/term-latency/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I often find myself using cmd (the old terminal prompt that is default WSL) on windows. It's not perfect, but I found a patch to enable ANSI color support and it's so much better latency-wise. I hope others work as well in the future; the fancy new much-lauded windows terminal, on the other hand, is to horribly latent for comfortable use (as are many others).

</comment><comment><USER29> Discussed earlier this year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19471857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19471857)

I feel like there was a larger discussion too, but can't find it. Anyone?

</comment><comment><USER30> I really wish there was a way for the browser to blit pixels to the screen in the shortest amount of time possible. Like talking directly to the GFX hardware using a restricted API like the Canvas 2d context.

<comment><USER31> That is literally what DirectX/Vulkan is for. They are the fastest API to blit pixels to screen (surfaces/textures as they call it).

<comment><USER30> I don't have high hopes for something designed by committee.

The Chromium team are experimenting with Low-latency (desynchronized) canvas, although I haven't been able to measure any differences in latency, the only difference is that desyncronization will cause some render issues.

I guess latency is a "full stack" problem where you have to design everything with low latency in mind. eg. keyboard, keyboard driver, render framework, gfx driver, and screen.

Here's an interesting article: [https://danluu.com/input- lag/](https://danluu.com/input-lag/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How I wish that I could use the new terminal app on the windows 10 build that is installed on my work Laptop.

<comment><USER33> Wow your work laptop is up to 10 already? We've started to plan our migration.

<comment><USER34> Windows 7.1 extend support ends on January 14, 2020. So is your org planning a very fast rollout or is it paying $$$ for Extended Security Updates?

<comment><USER35> There is nothing called Windows 7.1. Windows 7 extended support ends January 14, 2020. Windows 8.1 won't end its extended support until January 10, 2023.

<comment><USER36> It most likely is a reference to Windows 7 SP1. I've never seen it written as "7.1" but that is probably what they meant.

<comment><USER34> Yes sorry, that was a brain fart. I did indeed mean SP1. The Windows SDK version is 7.1 so I got muddled.

Windows 7 (without SP1) is already unsupported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Anyone else notice that typing directly on the tty is much faster than in a terminal emulator in X11?

<comment><USER19> Yes, without exception. It's less noticeable on today's powerful systems, but it's still true. Text mode is just faster than graphics mode, at least on any system where I've used both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Does Debian benefit from this work?

</comment><comment><USER39> TLDR (only slightly sarcastic); 'Because we do things the hard way instead of buying into the 30 layers of abstraction hype'

</comment><comment><USER35> Can a mod add (2018) to the title?

<comment><USER29> Done now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> lol, it crashes when output a lot of text try: yes

<comment><USER41> I just did. It works fine. How long should I let it run?

<comment><USER40> this one [https://github.com/microsoft/terminal](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal)

30 seconds or so

<comment><USER35> This is about the classic conhost, not the new Windows Terminal.

<comment><USER40> the one that can't handle ctrl+c to cancel yes? lol

<comment><USER42> Ctrl-C works fine in WSL on the current/old console.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> wsltty is the most underrated app i use on the regular. i was pumped about the new microsoft terminal for all of 5 seconds, then i used it, what a letdown.

with alot of help from wsltty and autohotkey, i am quickly approaching some sort of windows+linux singularity event, [https://i.imgur.com/cXykxPN.png](https://i.imgur.com/cXykxPN.png)

<comment><USER44> What apps are you using there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Too bad it doesn't handle Unicode. Also it's a shame that it doesn't have tabs or any hot keys for increasing productivity. It's really a good shell if you don't have work to do.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that's why I switched to wsltty many many months ago. It has comparable input latency, good hotkey support, clickable URLs, unicode support, etc..

<comment><USER45> Thank you very much! I will try that out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I was excited about WSL when I first heard about it. But that excitement quickly faded when I realized most real apps, such as gcc, don't work under it. The best way to get a Linux prompt on Windows is to use Docker. Use the -v option to share your drive.

<comment><USER47> Think it'd be worth trying on wsl2 again. The first version was too slow to use, but I am loving wsl 2 now. The integration between windows and the wsl2 vm is a lot more seamless than it used to be. You can navigate the c drive from the wsl shell and also do stuff like `explorer.exe .` to open a windows folder app in the current wsl directory. The vscode integration is amazing as well. After using a mac for many years, it took me about a week to be sold on using a windows laptop from here on out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's funny, because I quit using WSL because of high latency. I can't say input latency is a big deal to me. I can always wait 100ms for the buffer to catch up with my typing.

But when most commands have 500ms of overhead that is another story. My Xfce4 terminal running in a Hyper V VM is so much faster. If only there were seamless copy-paste. (Incidentally, I tried using Virtualbox but the latency there is more like WSL.)

<comment><USER2> You could always run VcXsrv to act as an X server.

Then you can launch GUI apps through your Hyper-V based VM (or any hypervisor).

It has seamless clipboard sharing that works out of the box once you enable the option.

I even went as far as running i3wm through VcXsrv for a while but ultimately gave that up since multi-monitor support didn't really work, but if you have 1 monitor it was actually quite usable.</comment></comment>