US government conducted airflow tests on NYC subway to understand bioterror risk - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160621-how-to-fight-bioterrorism-on-subways <comment><USER2> I am curious to find out how many reports they got from riders who saw the researchers. I know that if I saw someone releasing gas like in the picture in the article, I'd quickly find someone to talk to about it.

That said, hopefully they can validate models which will provide optimum locations for detectors, as well as action plans once a detection occurs, such as kill all cars near the detection and change venting airflows.

<comment><USER3> Nothing to worry about, they're wearing orange vests and carrying clipboards.

<comment><USER4> A guy in one of my old units used to carry a clipboard in the Army everywhere he went. He explained to us some years later that the clipboard was how he avoided being chosen for work details for years and years. Phenomenally clever idea.

<comment><USER5> Similar note, I found I could walk out of class anytime in high school and wander the halls as long as I looked sufficiently stressed. As long as you look like you have a purpose people will not bother you (unless you look like you have a purpose that you aren't fulfilling I suppose).

<comment><USER4> Yeah, totally. It works for avoiding too much attention from authority figures. I will never forget one time I was having a BBQ in an unauthorized area with my mom and ex-wife when this fat Air Force dude rolls by on his Segway. I turned to them and said "Just look like we're supposed to be here" but both of them, not being very good liars, continued with the deer-in- headlights look that guaranteed the guy started asking questions and eventually got us kicked off that part of the beach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In terms of the potential for economic damage, a full-fledged bioweapon attack is not all that much more effective than a low-sophistication attack (or several, staged at the same time).

So while it is useful to understand the way subway systems may disperse particles, this kind of research does not reduce the risk of economic damage from low-sophistication attacks targeted at the subway system.

It is difficult to obtain Anthrax or similar chemical agents, and the number of people needed to pull off a successful attack is fairly large. Machine guns or simple explosives (like those used in the Boston Marathon attack), however, are 100x more likely to succeed and cause the intended economic damage, so long as they either create a fear of traveling by subway or lead to security checkpoints that drastically reduce the subway's throughput.

The key takeaway, in my opinion, is that nobody with access to the NYC subway really wishes to harm it or do terrorism.

<comment><USER7> Fear is a huge part of any terrorist endeavor and small invisible particles killing you while you commute is far scarier than someone with conventional arms. Further, NYC subways would be closed for weeks, the US's largest city and an economic powerhouse would grind to a halt. The economic damage is such an event would be huge.

<comment><USER6> It would be very easy for a single unskilled attacker to kill upwards of 20 people using a conventional firearm or stuff that can be found at any hardware store.

I'd estimate that such an attack would result in the subway being closed for weeks, particularly if several happened successfully a few days apart.

Similarly, small explosions dispersing any remotely harmful smoke or chemicals (even chemicals that are easy to obtain) would be amplified by media coverage, and politicians would close the subways as a knee-jerk response.

Sure, an actual banned bioweapon/chemical would be worse, but my point is that terrorism (the tactic not the alleged existential threat) works because it requires little skill, technology, or access to difficult-to-obtain materials to create fear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is super important research, due to what the article calls, "low security threshold and high passenger count".

I wish the research results would be given to the public, though I understand why we won't see the results for some time, or possibly never.

It's also kind of scary that their only listed "remediation" is to have more accurate contamination maps. It really hits home the concept that, once a bad guy actually gets a weapon to a crowd, there's not much more that can be done.

<comment><USER9> Part of the idea behind "more accurate contamination maps" is to mobilize the appropriate response -- personnel, drugs, and so on. So it isn't just about knowing where to clean up (although it involves that, too).

These sorts of tests also aim at helping guide the first response. For a long time, there was an ongoing debate about the proper response to an attack on a subway (it's probably still going on, but I haven't talked with this crowd in a few years). For example, suppose a CCTV spots a bunch of passengers going down in a particular terminal. Should you shut down the ventilation system, in order to try to contain the material? Or should you crank up the system, in order to dilute the hazardous material? How should those decisions change depending on the type of material, the amount released, the atmospheric conditions, and the timing of the response? Should you stop all trains in the tunnels, or should you run them to the nearest station for evacuation? All of this requires estimating potential health impacts, to those on the platform, in the rest of the system, and downwind of the affected stations.

<comment><USER10> > ...there was an ongoing debate about the proper response...

I don't know about subway specifics, but the matter was settled a long time ago for buildings - and it didn't take long to arrive at the conclusion. Containment is the policy. The first thing that happens when any toxic substance is suspected, in a security conscious facility, is the shutdown of HVAC followed by the restriction of uncontrolled movement (elevators sent home, security posted in stairwell, etc). Even in areas equipped with filtration systems (like mail rooms). I've never heard anyone suggest dilution, you'd have to have NBC sensors that can instantly detect every toxic substance in order to avoid unknowingly spreading anthrax piggybacked on an irritant like CS. Such sensors do not exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recently saw the air analyzers in some stations across NYC. Thanks for doing this!

</comment><comment><USER12> I appreciate the research, but I'm not sure what could possible be done to change the situation materially. "Making more accurate contamination maps" strikes me as only useful in a really best case scenario.

<comment><USER13> Better than doing nothing I suppose. Also, sometimes the research needs to be done to know whether we can do nothing or whether we can.

<comment><USER12> A very fair point, but in this case installing filters or a reasonable hope for decontamination isn't really an option; the only thing we can do is prevent, detect, and evacuate.

<comment><USER14> Which makes faster detection a huge deal - I'd imagine one of the conclusions drawn from the results will be how best to detect ASAP without putting sensors literally everywhere.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure that's feasible. It sounds like releasing an agent anywhere in the system is going to lead to it being pistoned through the entire system. You don't even need to do it at a stop. You'd need sensors at stops though, and presumably in the tunnels all along the way to sense a release. Nothing else would give more than a second or two of warning, that would initiate a lethal panic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So we allowed people to go on trains in large number without lengthy security checks but not for airline travelers?

What's the difference?

<comment><USER16> It's hard to fly a train into a building.

(That doesn't excuse the TSA's security theater, obviously.)

<comment><USER17> It's also easier to stop a train, get off a train, or prevent collateral damage in case of malice/accident. Survivors are also a lot more likely if there is an accident, mostly because of gravity.

<comment><USER18> Very true. Even in the worst train derailments you never hear that there were no survivors.

<comment><USER5> Assuming passenger trains of course. I think a freight hijacking is far more likely. The danger posed by a hijacked freight are evident from the huge numbers of lives lost from exploding petroleum trains over the past few decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They did something similar in the 1950's - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea- Spray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray)

</comment><comment><USER20> My understanding was this was done before. The main take-away was that anything spread by air in NYC subway wouldn't get too far as there is enough mixing with the outside.

Still, this may be more thorough.

</comment><comment><USER21> For something that involves the US gov, anthrax, and a crowded public place, that was remarkably ethical.

Clickbaity title IMO, but I'm not sure what to suggest. I think the current title suggests malice on the part of the US gov, but they were actually just doing some interesting research.

<comment><USER22> Can you point to a word, or collection of words in the title that you think suggests malice? Or, is it the whole title that makes the suggestion?

As I am reading the title, no malice is suggested. It seems to just be a plain statement of fact.

<comment><USER23> They conducted _airflow_ tests in order to understand and model how airborne material would spread. They didn't conduct _bioterror_ research.

<comment><USER24> Well, they conducted airflow tests related to bioterror threats which is most of what makes the story newsworthy. But that's getting a bit long for a headline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> ...man, I was all ready to get out the pitchforks in response to "bioterror" research in a public place, but it turns out it's more "fluid dynamics research prompted by the risk of particulate bioweapons". It's not a clickbait title, but it asymptotically approaches one.

<comment><USER26> If it's written by BBC, it's probably not going to be something very damning about the U.S. government, quite the contrary.

<comment><USER27> Let us not make wide sweeping statements about the journalistic relationship between one of the world's largest news organizations and one of the world's largest nations. Seems a bit blunt.</comment></comment></comment>


Don't Post About Me on Social Media, Children Say - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/dont-post-about-me-on-social-media-children-say/?_r=0 <comment><USER2> This should go without saying. It blows my mind sometimes to think about cavalier attitude some parents have for their children's privacy and right to self-determination.</comment>


AMD announces Turbo CORE for upcoming desktop CPUs - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/04/amd-announces-turbo-core-for-upcoming-desktop-cpus.ars

<comment><USER2> "Turbo" fell off PCs sometime in the mid-nineties when all the games which relied on a 4.77MHz clock were well and thoroughly obsolete.

I don't want to see it get back on again, in any form, especially since I do most of my computing mobilely these days and battery life/power consumption is more critical to me than pure raw unbridled performance.

<comment><USER3> These types of Turbo, well, Intel's moreso, helps you conserve power.

Consider the mobile i7 quad core line. It starts at only 1.6 ghz - but in single core mode can hit near 3 ghz.

This helps you get the performance you need for single threaded apps (hint: a lot of stuff), while not having to power 4 or more cores on all the time.</comment></comment>


BoltDB vs. Badger: A Comparison of Go Key-Value Databases - <AUTHOR> https://tech.townsourced.com/post/boltdb-vs-badger/ <comment><USER2> Nice.

Thanks for sharing the information and for your Project "BadgerHold".</comment>


DeepMind's AlphaGo Continues Dominance with Second Win in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/05/googles-alphago-continues-dominance-second-win-china/ <comment><USER2> Currently on front page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14415501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14415501)</comment>


Show HN - Turing Festival - <AUTHOR>

In a couple of weeks time there is the 2nd Turing Festival in Edinburgh on the theme 'Digital Everywhere'. All kinds of cool stuff - people from the Higgs Boson Team at Cern, people from the JPL Interplanetary Exploration Team, the lawyer who won the Twitter Bomb Joke trial in the UK, Steve Wozniak, etc, etc. turingfestival.com
It takes place during the famous Edinburgh Festival which is a month of culture with thousands of performers. We modelled it on the Festival itself - a curated core and then a totally open, do-it-yourself fringe where anyone can organise anything.
What I want to show you is not this year's Turing Festival - but next year's one - the one where Hacker News folk organise crazy sessions on Modern Assembly, NoSQL hacking, home made submarines and near space balloon photography or whatever on the Fringe at Turing.
(Its not too late to come to Turing this year though, and TuringTown will find you a place to stay with local geeks as well).
If you want to do something my email is on my HN account. <comment><USER2> Went to the last one, some great stuff. Wanted to mention that unlike a normal conference, tickets are available for each session on an individual basis. This means you can pick and choose which ones you want, and you can mix shows from the world famous Edinburgh Festivals into your schedule. It makes it much more accessible - only pay for what you want, and many are free.

The link, BTW, is <http://www.turingfestival.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm kinda considering going. Not sure if it'll be worth my while though...</comment>


Show HN: Disrupting the options trading industry - <AUTHOR> https://www.jellifin.com/ <comment><USER2> Its just a sign-up page. Please read [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

"If your work isn't ready for people to try out yet, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then.

Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they can't be Show HNs."

<comment><AUTHOR> Duly noted. Thanks for sharing the rules. We will surely do that once our platform is live :)</comment></comment>


ASk YC: How to build a reddit for my own country - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to build a reddit for my own country's news - Bangladesh. I dont want to use a sub reddit. I want to build my own. I am thinking of using Ruby, but would appreciate your advice. Also are there any recommendation algorithms that you can suggest? Thanks <comment><USER2> The source for hacker news is opensourced. Why don't you just use that?

<comment><USER3> Not recommended if you are not already a lisp pro. The way you configure news.arc is through an arc prompt.

<comment><USER2> good point...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like <http://www.slinkset.com> \-- not open source and missing features, though

</comment><comment><USER4> You can use:

Pligg: <http://www.pligg.com/> PHPDugg: <http://www.kubelabs.com/phpdug/>

</comment><comment><USER5> We're building Bangladesh specific news sources into NewsCred ,currently in private alpha (I'm from Bangladesh too!) Drop me an email (shafqat[at]newscred.com] and we can talk.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160939></comment>


Amazon: 'Networking event' triggered problems with EBS storage - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/21/major-amazon-outage-ripples-across-web/

<comment><USER2> I hate articles like this.

Outages happen. Stuff breaks. Plan for it. When it happens in a way you don't have a plan for, update your plan.

Last I heard, reddit was operating with 1 sysadmin. If they had to employee the staff to run their own hardware AND own their own hardware, I suspect we wouldn't have reddit: it wouldn't be profitable. I'm also part of a startup, and thanks to AWS, we were able to be in two separate data centers from day 1. In the past companies, it's a struggle to get one up and running.

Plus, if they were running their own datacenter and had a 'network event', don't you think it would be down anyway? In fact, I'd expect more outages due to less available capacity to fail over to.

Running your machines on EC2 is no less risky than running them at Rackspace or any other non-cloud hosting providing. If there is an outage in core infrastructure, you're going to be down. If you think a 99.999 uptime guarantee means anything when the shit hits the fan, you've probably never worked with hosting providers before.

</comment><comment><USER3> For some reason I pictured a bunch of sysadmins at a cocktail party with their phones turned off swapping business cards. Then I read the article.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any way a non-American citizen can get antibiotics in NYC? - <AUTHOR>

Hi folks,
Currently I am in NYC (Manhattan) and I happen to feel quite sick and knowing myself it will probably get worse and the only way it will go away is to take antibiotics. However, I am not an American citizen (I am from Eastern Europe) and hence I don't know how the health system works here. Could someone tell me if there's any way I could get a prescription from a doctor so I can buy antibiotics?
Any help would be much appreciated! Thank you in advance! <comment><USER2> Yes, this is pretty routine here. Go to a doctor's office which accepts walk- ins (most of them do -- in a pinch, every hospital will let you wait briefly for the emergency room, or you can Google for "acute care center" or "urgent care center"). They'll ask for your insurance information. Tell them that you have none and will be self-paying. You'll fill out a brief form, be seen by the doctor, likely get a prescription written, and get presented with a bill. It will likely be somewhat larger than what you're used to paying to see the doctor. You can take the prescription to any pharmacy, and pay there for the antibiotics. They will likely be more expensive than you are used to.

American doctors, by law and near universal custom, treat patients without regards to citizenship.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where you should go depends on severity of disease. If you are seriously ill, you should go to an _emergency department_ at a hospital. (If you had a primary doctor in the US, they might be able to admit you directly without going through the ED if you were very ill.) If you are ill and need to be seen soon, _urgent care_ centers exist and they should be able to see you quickly. If you are well enough to wait for a few days-to-weeks, then you can schedule an appointment with a doctor.

How it is paid for depends on insurance status. I don't know whether your home country has national insurance, how that works once you're in the US, or whether you personally have private insurance. If you are not insured in any way, then you could be liable for expenses.

Finally, it seems unlikely that a doctor would write you for antibiotics without seeing you first, but who knows.

</comment><comment><USER4> Having to negotiate some paperwork is a small price to pay for not dying of an infection. The ER is required by law to provide you with care, regardless of your ability to pay, or immigration status. They do not 'turn in' or 'report' people without ID/passport/green-card/etc. Depending on the nature of your illness, just taking an oral antibiotic is unlikely to be curative.

If you really want to just take an antibiotic, you could just rush order from here with no prescription needed. Fish antibiotics are the same as humans...just less quality control. [http://www.fishmoxfishflex.com/index.php/fish- antibiotics.ht...](http://www.fishmoxfishflex.com/index.php/fish- antibiotics.html)

Amazon must have cracked down on their sale because they aren't available judging from the search results.

</comment><comment><USER5> Duane Reade walk in is likely your best bet. It will probably cost $200, though.

[http://www.drwalkin.com/](http://www.drwalkin.com/)

If you're living in NYC for a while, I suggest a membership with One Medical Group.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot guys! Went to Duane Reade and got what I needed.</comment>


Apple Products and EU-wide Consumer Laws - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/ <comment><USER2> A few months ago I went to the Apple store in Covent Garden (London) to repair my Macbook Air charger and the "genius" guy told me they would only cover one year warranty. This page would have been very useful back then.</comment>


Show HN: MMOsteroids: JS, Go, and Webrtc - <AUTHOR> https://www.emergencevector.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> In case you're curious, I documented my progress in these videos: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x2uQjLtXkY&list=PLnAL8xf0QQ...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x2uQjLtXkY&list=PLnAL8xf0QQaD0bN5tCGnvh7Qq_kpFZznO)

EDIT: I guess I'm not going to get anywhere near my max theoretical population of 560.

EDIT: Had to reboot the instance server. The WebRTC processes are holding up, though.

<comment><USER2> Are you using webrtc for client to server communication? or just for client to client? if the former, what library did you use on the server?

I've made lots of small browser games but haven't tried in the last few years. Websockets have never scaled well for the obvious reason that over bad connections data gets blocked up!

I don't understand what to do on your game, and the UI needs work. You're obviously very good at the physics/networking side of things, but maybe get some help on the UI :D I played for 10 seconds then had to close it

<comment><AUTHOR> There's an old school tutorial here:

[https://secure.emergencevector.com/tutorial/](https://secure.emergencevector.com/tutorial/)

If you can't figure out how to make it into Hyperspace, you are officially a weakly interacting massive particle! :D

Everything is client-server, client wins, except for one thing. (Left as an exercise.) WebRTC is only there as a substitute for UDP.

<comment><USER2> Ahh nice, sounds like a good setup. Did you use an open source library for the server side part of WebRTC? I'm super interested in having a play with a good implementation if you have any tips..

<comment><AUTHOR> I used some variation of node-electron. Here is the top of the node server file:

        var wrtc = require('electron-webrtc')({ headless: true });
        var SimplePeer = require('simple-peer');
        var requestify = require('requestify');
        var dgram = require('dgram');

The Go server uses UDP to talk to one of the 4 node server processes, which are running instances of Chromium under xvfb under tmux. There's a lot of code load overhead for the 4 processes, in terms of a lot of Chromium loaded but not running, but EC2 servers are RAM heavy, so not an issue.

I haven't looked into exploiting the new true headless mode in Chrome yet, which should simplify things a lot. I'm also thinking of doing a full port to Go for WebRTC. That's a lot of stuff, however.

<comment><USER2> Ahh interesting, thank you for that. That's an interesting point re headless mode in Chrome (and Firefox now I guess!). It's a shame there's not an easier way though yet..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPilot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPilot)

I'll give it a shot when I get home from work!

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a long shot... but are those sound effects from Starcon 2? Particularly the rockets fired from these guys ([https://imgur.com/a/TU5kr](https://imgur.com/a/TU5kr))?

I played Star Control 2 many times over as a kid and can't help but think that my many (many!) hours in front of that game have trained a part of my neural nets to excel at recognizing the sounds and readying for battle. 20 seconds into this game those paths were triggered, hence my Q.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mmmmmmmmmaybe? ;)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the laser sound as well I think? :) The instruments for the two songs I made for Voxel Quest were ripped from Star Control and other tracker files. [https://soundcloud.com/gavan-woolery/voxel-quest- song-1](https://soundcloud.com/gavan-woolery/voxel-quest-song-1) [https://soundcloud.com/gavan-woolery/voxel-quest- song-2](https://soundcloud.com/gavan-woolery/voxel-quest-song-2)

<comment><USER4> Wow, that first one is like Ur-Quan + Yehat + Spathi all wrapped into one! These both definitely nailed the SC2 aesthetic, thanks for sharing. (And also for all your work on VQ, it was an amazing journey to follow!)

<comment><USER5> very late reply, but you are welcome! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I played it, and to be honest I couldn't figure it out. I did read the instructions. I pressed shift and some yellow things went flying out of my ship. I don't know what they did. Could do that about 3 times, then it didn't happen when I pressed shift again. Tried pressing space bar to shoot, nothing happened. Got killed right away by a group of three ships. Played a couple of times, gave up.

<comment><AUTHOR> You kept firing and ran out of energy. That's okay. I'm from the 80's arcade days. It's a level of difficulty that's way too much for you younguns. I swear, I had Battlezone set up, and so many kids walked up to it, spend 2 seconds wiggling the joysticks then walked away. There was this one kid who was like, "what is that clock doing?" (That was the RADAR!)

Back in my day, at summer computer camp we'd wander around the college campus looking for a teletype that actually printed on paper to break into the system to play a game. We'd be so hard up for games, we'd type in source code listings from paper magazines. That's how we learned how to program!

It was just too hard for you! Them's the breaks!

<comment><USER7> Haha old guy bias. I did make it all the way through Stargate btw. That game was a screaming bitch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tried playing it but there's a group of spaceships that is constantly destroying me in less than a minute :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> Try thrusting so your velocity doesn't take you into the central swarm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was fun, a bit hard to figure out, but I did eventually manage to kill quite the number of enemy (?) ships and even travel through hyperspace!

I also tried to save some other players by killing the ships that were following them, but they never survived…

<comment><AUTHOR> I know. People die so easily, then just give up. Kids these days!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the sounds effects blew out my speakers in my headphones... well at least my ear drum. I was not prepared, and I was listening to music loudly ;-) . Warning to all to turn your sound down before playing.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious about Webrtc vs WS with binary protocol?

<comment><AUTHOR> WebRTC lets you get out of head-of-line blocking. (TCP stream semantics.) This can be a real killer with regards to latency with bad network.

[https://gafferongames.com/post/udp_vs_tcp/](https://gafferongames.com/post/udp_vs_tcp/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The look reminds me of an old Asteroids-like game for OS/2 (I forget the name). Just a coincidence, or was that an inspiration?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a lot of ripping off of Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters.

<comment><USER13> Yeah the main weapon sound is from a poor copy of the Earthling Cruiser :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would have tried it, but it wanted me to create an account. For an Asteroids game tech demo. Why not just ask for a name?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the second time that I have posted a link to a multiplayer game server on HN. With my first server (which was also written in Golang with a Javascript front end) I "automatically" logged in the player. When you do that, some smarty pants on HN writes a script to do nothing but log in.

I've thought of some low-friction registration methods, but making them @sshat proof takes more effort than just having a registration and slapping a captcha on it.

<comment><USER15> Automatic registration with "invisible" recaptcha? [https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/invisible](https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/invisible)

<comment><AUTHOR> I might have to use this! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nicely done! The basics are there, the next step could easily be something pretty compelling.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ha it's like Subspace! But... not as good. Subspace deserves a web-based conversion.

<comment><USER18> Ahhh Subspace. I break that out every once in a while as a game that was perfectly designed for it's constraints. 200-400 player real-time battles all over a 28.8 modem, truly a work of art.

I think the community took over it at some point and it's still kicking around somewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Ahhh Subspace. I break that out every once in a while as a game that was perfectly designed for it 's constraints._

Oh yeah! Subspace! Its successor is on Steam. The original implementation suffered greatly because it had a client-trusting architecture, and it was subject to endless cheating.

[http://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum/)

I'm explicitly not trying to be Subspace. I actually can't support (to my high standards) the kind of real-time Subspace was trying for. (I can't guarantee your angular orientation is what you think it is down to 1/60th of a second.) My eventual goal is to try to implement a Space MMO, sort of like a 2D arcade space Eve Online.

Also: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3DPalL7p5w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3DPalL7p5w)

<comment><USER17> Are you sure it isn't still client-based? Continuum was protocol-compatible with Subspace so was also client-based (and was released when dialup was still popular so it had to be). This Steam version doesn't really look like they have rewritten it (why would they?), so I suspect it is still client-based unless you have any evidence to the contrary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is just awesome! Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER20> a PVE game could have client/client communication too.</comment>


Learn web development - <AUTHOR> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn <comment><USER2> While I used w3schools quite a bit I am now using MDN more and more, great reference! Hope Chrome/Safari/Edge etc all can join force on the web related document at MDN.

In particular, MDN now puts some demo code at the start before it dives into all the detailed tech info for the API etc, which is excellent.

<comment><USER3> If I need to google something JS or HTML related my query is usually "mdn ____".

<comment><USER4> DuckDuckGo has a bang that forwards to MDN directly:

!mdn ____

<comment><USER5> ! means "not" to me, so I read that as "not mdn" as in "don't include mdn results"

<comment><USER6> "Not" in search queries is the minus sign "-" directly prepended to the word or phrase

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've actually been using this to take a break from Node and start learning Django. It's been fantastic thus far. It was even enjoyable reading how they described fundamental concepts like the client server relationship.

Well done, Mozilla.

<comment><USER8> Does anyone have any recommendations for intermediate level web development texts, websites, tutorials, etc?

I've been teaching myself for some personal projects, and had an easy time finding "Javascript/PHP/CSS 101" type materials, and have a decent grasp of these. But when it comes to sticking them all together into an application, I find myself just guessing what the best way to do things is. What I should do server side vs in the browser, when to use iframes vs ajax requests vs reloading the page, etc.

<comment><USER9> For intermediate level learning, I've always used the one-more-search rule of thumb:

When you think you've got it, do one more Google search to verify your way of thinking. It will often start leading you down a rabbit hole that will make you realize you don't have it, thus causing another one-more-search.

After [https://xkcd.com/214/](https://xkcd.com/214/) you are so much further along than if you didn't do just one-more-search.

<comment><USER10> I would rather recommend the opposite: forget about the one-more-search rabbit hole and just get started. Three hours spent on programming is going to be much more useful than three hours spent on googling.

If you want to learn to play the violin, you're not going to get there by reading books about the shape of Paganini's fingers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a German I'm so glad that I didn't have to learn German as a second language.

As a software developer I'm glad I was there when the web began and was allowed to code some bad Perl CGI and horrible HTML.

<comment><USER12> > was allowed to code some bad Perl CGI and horrible HTML

Today's starters write equally bad JavaScript and equally bad HTML; don't be fooled by the cargo culters stating otherwise.

<comment><USER3> The standards have also changed, as well as the language itself!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Title needs to be updated: it's MDN web docs, not Mozilla web docs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another source of excellent documentation about CSS is [https://css- tricks.com/](https://css-tricks.com/)

Definitely worth to read!

</comment><comment><USER15> Thank you Mozilla! <3

</comment><comment><USER16> Mozilla, One of the best resources to learn web things.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thank you Mozilla!!</comment>


World's first virtual train track unveiled in central China - <AUTHOR> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-06/03/c_136336433.htm <comment><USER2> Flash player what is this 2006?

Also was wondering what virtual meant</comment>


Shark Tank on Hulu - A Fun Investor Reality Show - <AUTHOR> http://www.hulu.com/watch/88498/shark-tank-series-premiere#s-p1-so-i0

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the "College Foxes Hauling Boxes" guys screwed up. They probably shouldn't ever have gone on the show at all but since they didn't take the offer all they've done is broadcast their business model to millions of people across America.</comment>


Why I went to prison for teaching physics - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/article/543876/my-unwanted-sabbatical/ <comment><USER2> Some more background:[http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/954642](http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/954642)

<comment><USER3> The context is appreciated, but is there a better source than the Huffington Post? The sidebar shows me a recommended headline calling the GOP neo-fascist, which undermines the article a bit.

Though your article is appreciated. It's nice to be reminded that many issues, like freedom of expression, are important all across the American political spectrum.

<comment><USER2> I don't know - I'm not familiar with the topic and found the original article vague and uninformative so looked up some more info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How likely is this situation in the rest of the world? Can one end up behind bars for teaching at an "unofficial" school?

<comment><USER3> > How likely is this situation in the rest of the world? Can one end up behind > bars for teaching at an "unofficial" school?

Maybe I'm reading this incorrectly, but it sounds like Mr. Badavam's crimes were _being Baha 'i_ and teaching at a school for Baha'i students.

From the article:

"Iran's Baha'i community created BIHE in the 1980s after our youth were banned from Iranian universities. I began volunteering there in 1989 after serving three years in prison for simply being an active Baha'i."

If I'm reading this correctly, the title is a bit misleading.

<comment><USER5> You are reading this correctly. The "for teaching physics" title is clickbait, which does not appear to be reflected in the body of the article. Baha'i is a religion, and he was imprisoned for apostasy from Islam in a country where that is considered a crime.

Relevant information is here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_Faith#Perse...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_Faith#Persecution)

It's pretty ugly.

To answer the GP's question: if you are in Iran, you are likely to end up in prison for any form of openly displaying an unwillingness to follow Islamic rules. If you should find yourself in Iran, my best advice is to leave at the earliest opportunity.

<comment><USER6> > To answer the GP's question: if you are in Iran, you are likely to end up in > prison for any form of openly displaying an unwillingness to follow Islamic > rules. If you should find yourself in Iran, my best advice is to leave at > the earliest opportunity.

I don't think that's correct. Apostasy though is banned by law(not just for muslims).

Also whether it's true or not that there is a strong relationship between Baha'i and Israel the world center is in Haifa. You don't need to be a genius to know that doesn't play ball with the Mullah's.

Any of the downvoters care to explain their downvote? Saying 1800 doesn't properly capture that it was founded in 1844 and that by 1853 he the main guy left, because after the previous guy was executed after he declared himself the messiah and wrote a new sharia law, and in '50 his followers tried to assassinate the shah.

<comment><USER7> The reason the Baha'i world center is in Haifa Israel is because the Persian authorities in the 1800's banished its founder outside its borders to the Ottomonan Empire next door. there was no Israel at the time. The mullahs just find it convenient to use as an excuse to discriminate and treat any non muslims as 2nd class citizens.

<comment><USER8> The Baha'i world center is beautiful by the way. Well worth a visit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_World_Centr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_World_Centre)

Persian authorities -> let's just say muslims, and stop trying to claim that these people are treated differently in any muslim country. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy#/media/File:Apostasy_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy#/media/File:Apostasy_laws_in_2013.SVG) (note that Indonesia is not correct, people are executed there for leaving islam all the time : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyq6WMatTEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyq6WMatTEQ) )

If anything, Iran is very flexible in it's interpretation of islam (events like in Indonesia are pretty much unthinkable in Iran). Even in this case. You see, the prescribed punishment for what this guy did, according to islam, is not imprisonment at all. It is execution:

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

The constant weaseling out of stating the fact, the sort of treatment muslims give people of non-islamic faiths, and atheists (read the blog "the big pharaoh" a bit) is very a very controversial fact : just read the wikipedia article, the constant sentences about "a minority thinks different". Reality is that polls place the number of muslims that want to execute people like this physics teacher is just over 70%, and more in countries like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and a dozen others. You will experience the same constant weaseling out if you talk to muslims in America. When you're in an islamic ghetto, in Europe (some have quite nice food), they (in one case the same muslim) will readily point it out though. Seems to have something to do with how many muslims there are.

Of course this means that the basic article of the current politically correct order, that humans just want to live together in peace, is not true for around 70% of muslims. Whether they'll take immediate action on that opinion is a different matter, true, but that obviously doesn't apply once muslims are ~60% of the local population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No account ? Block the pop up and the black screen with your favorite adblocker

<comment><USER10> If you have ublock with advanced mode turned on you can fix it in one click by turning off third party scripts.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Iran had a parliamentary democracy until 1953. In 1953, the prime minister, Mosaddegh, began talking about nationalizing Iran's oil. The UK and the USA went by the normal playbook, bankrolling minorities, religious and otherwise to subvert the government (like the Hmong in Vietnam, Miskitos in Nicaragua etc.) The CIA and SIS also backed the ayatollahs who wanted to overthrow the parliament and establish an Islamic republic - like Ayatollah Mohammad Behbahani, Mohammad Falsafi and even Abol-Ghasem Kashani at the end.

So western readers knowing this can know the history - the secular parliament of Iran was overthrown when the US and UK backed the ayatollahs and others in ousting it. Then in the 1970s, the ayatollahs wanted an end to US influence in Iran, which is when Iran began becoming a pariah. US nuclear companies were printing ads in newspapers boasting about how they were helping make Iran a nuclear power ( [http://img.myconfinedspace.com/wp- content/uploads/2008/04/sh...](http://img.myconfinedspace.com/wp- content/uploads/2008/04/shah-iran.jpg) ). This is in the years before the GOP invited Netanyahu to Congress to scold Obama that he wasn't bombing Iran for wanting to use nuclear power (also, it's implicit that Israel is allowed to be a nuclear power, Iran isn't).

It has little difference from other countries - if you notice, the US has been working to overthrow the last of the old Nasserite pan-Arab nationalist pseudo-socialist governments like in Iraq, Libya and more recently Syria. In fact, the US has been arming jihadists fighting Assad's secular government - something Putin himself has noted. Meanwhile the US backs to the hilt Islamic dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, Brunei etc. which are lapdogs to the US.

This notion that the US government is against Islamic radicalism is absured. It's true enemies are always the Qadaffis, the Saddam Hussein's, the Assads, the Mossadeghs. The US supports Islamic fundamentalist jihadists - Osama bin Laden is a creation of the US, banking his and the mujahideen fight against a secular socialist Afghani government. Sylvester Stallone made a Rambo movie where he went to Afghanistan and fought alongside the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, attacking the secular socialist Afghani government and Russians, the end of the movie credits are "dedicated to the brave Mujaheddin fighters". That movie came out in 1988, 13 years before 9/11.

<comment><USER12> Mossadiq was as a matter of historic fact a dictator, complete with 99% election victory results. Let's not allow NYTimes and CIA to write Iranian history for us as it is, and has been, currently convenient for the West to paint the Shah of Iran as a sort of incompetent monster and do mea culpa for _past_ unwanted intrusion in Iranian politics and society.

Re. Bahais, this is a controversial religion with roots in 19th century mysticism. The prophet of this religion claims to be the Messiah and pretty much every other Messiah rolled into one. He is in fact the claimant to the 2nd return of Christ. Now, should a nation allow anyone to go around claiming whoppers like this and allowed to operate a religion (which affords quite a lot of privs. in society). So the anti-bahai issue in Iran is really mostly about power and politics and has little to do with the Spirit. Iranians feel this is a fake religion that is used by West to manipulate Iranian society. Think of it as Scientology and Germany for a perspective.

[p.s. _obviously_ the above does not condone the actions of the Mullah regime. ]

<comment><USER7> I am with your points up until the generalization that "Iranians feel this is a fake religion". I cant speak for all Iranians... anyway your larger point about this being about power is spot on. Another aspect of the Baha'i world- view that is likely even more important is the fact that they dont have clergy. What do you think a government that is intrinsically tied to its clergy is going to do?</comment></comment></comment>


Dependency Injection in Functional Programming - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/gvolpe/1454db0ed9476ed0189dcc016fd758aa <comment><USER2> An essential reference for this discussion is Uncle Bob's OO vs FP article: [https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle- bob/2014/11/24/FPvsOO.html](https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle- bob/2014/11/24/FPvsOO.html)</comment>


Pytype checks and infers types for your Python code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/pytype/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> How does pytype compare with the PyAnnotate [1] and MonkeyType [2] dynamic / runtime PEP-484 type annotation type inference tools?

[1] [https://github.com/dropbox/pyannotate](https://github.com/dropbox/pyannotate)

[2] [https://github.com/Instagram/MonkeyType](https://github.com/Instagram/MonkeyType)</comment>


Facebook fought SEC to keep Mobile risks hidden before IPO - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-10/facebook-fought-sec-to-keep-mobile-risks-hidden-before-ipo-crash.html <comment><USER2>
        Ryan Cefalu, a 34-year-old data-systems manager and
        father of two in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said he
        bought about $4,000, or about a month's salary,
        in Facebook stock and has lost about $2,050 on paper.

        "The IPO went terribly," he said. "I expected it to go
        up for a couple days at least before it went it down.
        That never happened. It never had a chance to."

I have zero sympathy for him. His investment strategy appears to have been "find a bigger sucker" and, unfortunately for him, he turned out to be the bigger sucker.

I'm a shareholder in FB, and have lost about 18% of the money I've put in, but I always expected it to go down for a while[1]. I actually never intended to invest until the first lockup period expired, but I got edgy when they finally started revealing their Adsense-esque ad strategy. As it works out, I'm actually at breakeven on the money invested after the first lockup expired. I figure that, within a couple years, my wild and crazy 'buy and hold' strategy is going to look pretty smart.

Then again, I could always turn out to be the bigger sucker ;-)

[1] Of course, my first tranche is down 40%, but I'm actually making it up on volume :P

<comment><USER3> _> I have zero sympathy for him. His investment strategy appears to have been "find a bigger sucker" and, unfortunately for him, he turned out to be the bigger sucker._

While I have no sympathy for him specifically, if a significant risk was deliberately kept from potential investors then I'd support investors more generally (I'm sure there were many who had less silly investment plans, who were genuinely investing in a company to see it and their investment grow long term) if they demanded an investigation into why this did end up staying hidden until after the IPO.

If fb _fought_ to keep the information hidden, the situation can't as easily be filed under "it is the investor's problem that they didn't ask/research" as many stock market moans can be.

<comment><USER4> The SEC's role is to play devil's advocate. You would think it obvious that FB would fight against that.

To me this article screams: "Waaah, I lost money on FB. Yes, they disclosed all of their risks ahead of time, but I would rather they would have predicted the future so I could go back and not invest".

If you think investing in hype is guaranteed money, you deserve what you get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The "average Joe investor" stories seem weirdly out of place, particularly for a Bloomberg piece. I guess it's a shallow attempt to engender sympathy, which is odd because I have precisely zero sympathy for either of them.

Lots of people (myself included) had been saying that Facebook was overvalued pre-IPO. I don't say this as any testament to any investment acumen I purport to possess (on the contrary, I largely suck at particularly short term share trading). What I do mean is that as an outsider with some cursory research and common sense, this was entirely predictable.

The only unknown with the IPO was how irrational the market would be and I'm glad to see it wasn't.

The people who say "look at the eyeballs they have; the sky is the limit" are the last people you should take investment advice from. Facebook had (and has) two primary sources of revenue: advertising and virtual goods. Valued against similar companies it was overvalued. And still is (IMHO).

I think this piece overstates that Facebook was attempting to hide things here. It's natural that any IPO will try to disclose as little as possible and try to be as positive as possible while stil being truthful and accurate.

Personally I may think of buying in if its gets down to $10-12.

Even so, Facebook is an extremely risky investment. Instagram is a cautionary tale here: from nothing to existential threat that you need to buy-to-shelve for $1 billion in two years... well, I guess it doesn't take much to threaten Facebook.

<comment><USER6> > Lots of people (myself included) had been saying that Facebook was > overvalued pre-IPO.

You could have shorted the stock or traded options.

There was a fair bit of uncertainty because the average Joe, his family and friends all used FB. Many investors feared that the stock would be driven by sentiment rather than rationality. If the stock went to 50, it would not have surprised me.

Like you I didn't support the high IPO valuations either but I still would love to own the stock with minimal downside risk. As would a lot of other people out there. FB has a lot of appeal.

At $10 the company will have a market cap of about $20 billion, which is pretty low for a company with a billion monthly active users. If you discount that, you are probably discounting the bigger picture.

At some point Apple had tremendous unrealized potential. The idea that it could get into phones and do really well wasn't hard to digest. On the contrary, it seemed like an obvious move.

FB has similar unrealized revenue potential. It could start charging $X per month to businesses with > Y fans. It could offer premium dashboards + analytics or similar features. There is no shame in premium, I am not sure why they only do advertising and commissions but my sense is that currently they are focused on growth and building a moat around their business.

I don't own the stock and I don't care if it goes up or down but your post seems be discounting the company's potential.

<comment><USER7> _> Lots of people (myself included) had been saying that Facebook was overvalued pre-IPO.

You could have shorted the stock or traded options._

Before you short any stock, it is wise to keep in mind the maxim "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent". This isn't really a problem on the long side (sans margin), but is a real problem on the short side.

<comment><USER8> That's the main reason I didn't short it - so many people seemed so invested in the IPO being a success, that I thought it would turn into a self- fulfilling prophecy. I'm surprised it fell so far and so fast; I think the trading glitch on NASDAQ took the bubbles out of the champagne for so many people that fiscal reality set in a lot earlier than it would have otherwise. Of course, going on the market at $38 didn't help, but their pricing strategy was sort of constrained by activity on Second Market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The IPO has done a lot to convince me that Facebook is a fundamentally slimy company. Regular day-by-day use of Facebook convinces a lot of my friends of the same thing. So why are we using Facebook day by day? Because we think we can catch up with one another's news and have interesting discussions on topics we all enjoy at the expense of Facebook's investors.

This has been done before. A lot of my friends used to hold their noses and gripe about AOL, but use it daily. AOL was founded in the 1980s, so it has reached the twenty-five-year age referred to in another comment in this thread. AOL is still in business, amazingly, although it is now far from being the dominant company in online interaction (that would be Facebook, these days). I've said it before, and I'll say it again: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it." I could be wrong, but that's my sense of where Facebook is in the market.

<comment><USER8> Agreed about AOL, and I'd cite Compuserve as an additional example. Fundamentally, I feel these companies are the online equivalent of shopping malls - consistent, curated, and safe. They even have the same sort of controversies: controversial photos of breastfeeding Moms on Facebook don't seem all that different from kerfuffles over breastfeeding in a mall food court. In pg-speak, facebook would be more of a cathedral than a bazaar, but I'm not quite ready to equate shopping with religion :-)

I don't think there's anything wrong with this; I'm not a shopping mall type consumer, but I enjoy wandering one now and again and can see the attraction. From an investment standpoint, it strikes me that the value of brick-and- mortar shopping malls is very much a function of the diversity and quality of the tenants they can attract, making Zynga the equivalent of the 1980s amusement arcade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found the initial valuation questionable to start out with.

But its clear to me, Zuckerberg is more interested in long term growth of his company than he is any short term profitability goals. I think Facebook may well be a great stock to hold over decades - but not for months or weeks, as the current market seems to think in.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't want to hold any Internet-based stocks for "decades". I believe the life span of any public company to be 25 years or less, with Internet service companies being significantly less.

<comment><USER12> 25 years? Aren't there public companies still very alive and kicking that were founded before ww2? Whose stock is still pretty valuable?

Boeing comes to mind. BMW as well. General Electric maybe. Actually plenty of things in the hardware space.

<comment><USER13> Certainly. There are also many that no longer exist.

From a summary I wrote of "Why Most Things Fail":

Of the 100 largest industrial companies in 1912, by 1995, 29 had gone bankrupt, 48 disappeared (mergers, acquisitions and so on), and 52 survived, but only 19 remained in the top 100. Once you discount the large number of small companies that fail in their first few years, the average lifespan for small companies is similar to that of large firms - and most of them eventually fail.

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000XUBDQM/?tag=dedasys-20> \- although I don't know if I'd recommend buying it. It's good, but never seemed to gel 100% for me.

<comment><USER12> Okay, that makes sense then. I can see how 25 years can be the expected lifespan of a public company.

However, of those 48 companies that disappeared. Aren't those essentially liquidity events resulting in a lot of money for the shareholders?

<comment><USER13> > However, of those 48 companies that disappeared. Aren't those essentially > liquidity events resulting in a lot of money for the shareholders?

Some were probably good, others bad for the shareholders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am not an investor, financier, etc, so this will be a horribly naive question. Please bear with me.

From the comments regarding FB's IPO on HN in general, I am under the impression that the point of an IPO is to gain the company as much money as possible, and that in this regard, Facebook's IPO was a resounding success.

From the point of view of an investor, though, the IPO was a huge failure. Knowing, then, that any company approaching an IPO is trying to get as much money as possible from its initial investors, why would anyone want to be one? Is it solely because they are hoping that the company will be wrong about its own potential measure of success? Or was the Facebook IPO somehow different than an "average" one?

<comment><USER15> >> Facebook's IPO was a resounding success.

That's correct. The CFO who led this should get a huge bonus. As Mark Cuban said: if the CFO said he was able to raise $10B in an IPO and then decided not to in order to protect investors, he should be fired. (That's a rough paraphrase.)

>> why would anyone want to be one?

Because if you can get in pre-IPO you usually do quite well selling to the suckers at the open. But the suckers don't realize that the key point is "pre-". A few might remember the glorious IPOs of the 90s that seemed to rocket up every day, and hope this will happen to every Internet IPO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _What investors didn't see until a month after the IPO were the letters that pushed Facebook to disclose in detail such key financial challenges as decelerating revenue growth, user count and its dependence on gaming company Zynga Inc. (ZNGA) -- all issues that arose in prominence after it became a public company.

Publishing the SEC letters beforehand would be "a better way to get the information to the market than an amended filing," said Peter Henning, a former SEC lawyer who teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit. "The SEC is a better soap box than the filings."_

Christ, that sounds like a PR disaster if not the stuff of more class action suits.

<comment><USER4> I guess you missed the next part:

 _Current SEC policy is to release correspondence no earlier than 20 business days after the IPO. The SEC doesn't post correspondence "real time," said John Nester, a spokesman, because "people could misinterpret our questions to companies about their disclosure before companies have had opportunities to provide a complete picture." By law, "a company is responsible for its own disclosures," he said._

The rules are the same for everyone... But only scrutinized when a company does poorly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> P/E of 100, stock dived. This should not surprise anyone.

Oracle has 15 P/E, so does Apple. Exxon has around 9 P/E.

For perspective; Amazon has 300 P/E, LinkedIn has 900ish.

With a bit of looking at investing information, you can get a rough sense of what's crazy to invest in for a individual investor looking at a < 1 year horizon. FB sure qualified IMO.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why they chose to quote two random individual investors, I cannot say. What did they add to the story?

<comment><USER19> Man on the street quotes give readers a personal connection to the story.

It's similar to the fact that if you tell someone a hundred people were killed in a bomb blast, they will brush it off. But if you describe the tragedy of a single victim, they will be crushed with feeling.</comment></comment>


Don't Destroy Your Dev Team by Growing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ayasin/don-t-destroy-your-dev-team-by-growing-eef50d83090e#.qxmrv48p9 <comment><USER2> "I believe the ideal ratio for senior to junior engineers is three senior to one junior engineer"

Either you're defining "senior" in a fairly wacky fashion or you've got a significantly inverted org chart in dev...

<comment><USER3> If you have it inverted - your senior devs are no longer devs and are instead managers of three junior devs each.

If your three junior devs don't need constant supervision by a senior dev - then they aren't junior devs, they're senior devs who aren't getting their due.

Currently I _am_ the senior dev in my organization. I'm in charge of 4 junior devs. I spend more time babysitting them than I do coding. Things ran smoother when there were three of us (seniors) and two juniors. But the other two seniors got moved to another team and my team got two new juniors to replace them.</comment></comment>


Breaking KASRL with micro architecture - <AUTHOR> http://dreamsofastone.blogspot.com/2016/02/breaking-kasrl-with-micro-architecture.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> KASLR is useless anyway. A single infoleak and it's game over.

[https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3367](https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3367)</comment>


Show HN: Finally stick to your new years resolution and write more with Blurt - <AUTHOR> https://blurt.app/@coreygwin/introducing-writing-efforts-from-blurt-hn/5c26cf60d7773b010df41168 <comment><USER2> Been using Blurt for the past week as an early tester of writing efforts. It has been really nice to have a goal every day to hit as I try to build a writing habit. It's my new years resolution, but I wanted to start early.

So far what is working for me to keep my habit up:

\- Have a list of topics to write about

\- Set aside a specific time each day to write (trying to figure out what time works best still)

\- Use the blur function on Blurt to do a brain dump

I still haven't built the habit where it comes "naturally", but I think this will help. I sub-consciously know that I want to meet my writing goal every day and keep my streak up.</comment>


Show HN: Superbar – a free macOS app to bring snippets and commands to menubar - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/superbar <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I found myself often reaching for notes, snippets, searching through cluttered bookmarks or doing repetetive system-tasks while using MacOS. So, I decided to build Superbar, a tiny menubar app that can store common snippets such as a Google Maps URL to your office, open bookmarks to your default browser so you can keep browsers clear of bookmark bars, run system commands in the background such as launching apps, workspaces, switch system themes and so on. Also, for developers I've included a "run-in-terminal" mode which will open any pre-defined command and run it in a new terminal window. Hope it's useful!</comment>


Ask HN: Should Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg Quit? - <AUTHOR> In light of the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, should these two important leaders quit as they prioritized growth even over the well being of their users? <comment><USER2> It isn't just Facebook that collects this data and allows others to use it - it's the business model for dozens of other organisations including Google. Two people quitting one organisation won't make much of a change but governments banding together to create legislation to better protect users would; however unlikely that is to happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know. But is it kind of odd that Mark Zuckerberg sold about 1 million+ shares at the Facebook high, days before the Cambridge Analytica debacle? I wonder if there is some insider trading there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why? Users are Facebook's product, I don't understand how what happened is a surprise to anyone!

<comment><USER5> > Users are Facebook's product

This is an interesting concept. Have you written about this before?

<comment><USER6> Customers pay. What is being paid for is the product / service.

Asymmetric business models are fairly common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Jailed

<comment><USER8> Because of which crime exactly? I get that you think this is some fantastic and insightful comment you have made, but it brings nothing to the table. I don't want to defend Facebook to heavily here but, what exactly did they, and specifically Mark Zuckerburg and Sheryl Sandberg do to deserve criminal jail time? As far as I can tell, nothing.

Facebook is a platform where users willingly put way too much personal data. Facebook sells advertising space and application space and presents ads and applications to those users. Users willingly and enthusiastically gobble up those ads and applications. Are we all shocked and amazed that there are bad actors in the market place that exploit such a massive hoard of extremely valuable data? Of course not.

Look, if you want to punish Facebook, leave. Get your family and friends to leave. Sell their stock. Take yourself, as a product, elsewhere. But there are no laws to punish a CEO and COO of a company with jail time for the exceptional stupidity of their users.

<comment><USER7> Because they knowingly threaten the underpinnings of free society. These are not naive people who have discovered that there is a problem with their product. They are extremely smart people capable of fully understanding the consequences of there actions.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's desensitisation of people to fundamental security practices - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/apples-desensitisation-of-the-human-race-to-fundamental-security-practices/ <comment><USER2> The author himself points out in the article that Apple provides you with the necessary tools to hand Apple support a completely wiped phone as they diagnose your issue and then recover it again at home. If his point is simply that this process is inconvenient and the state of the art should be better, then I think it's a pretty weak point.

The analogy that a commenter made here about a plumber entering your home is spot on. Like the locks on a door, the security mechanisms Apple has designed are constructed to thwart breaches on a large-scale (governments) and also on a small scale (your snooping family members).

Protecting it from people who need to service is it does not seem to fit any of these categories; if you cannot trust the Apple Genius in the store, seems silly that this same person would nonetheless trust the probably dozens of people who handled the device before it was finally placed in its box. And, like the plumber, if you somehow want him in your house and you want him to provide expert advice on how to fix your problem yet you fear that he may do something nefarious in the process, Apple does one better than "keepin' ya eye on him" \-- it essentially allows you to strip the house of all of your belongings so the plumber has nothing to look at but the sink. And then it lets you put all your things back in. Seems pretty good to me.

<comment><USER3> I took his point to be that Apple encourages you to go the insecure route and just trust them instead of teaching their customers good security awareness. Apple doesn't suggest to you to wipe your phone, they tell you to just trust them.

A better analogy from the physical world would be a locksmith who tells you to just leave your keys under the door mat for him so that he can come in and do the work when you aren't home.

<comment><USER4> And plenty of people would be willing to make that trade-off on security for convenience. (This is locksmith right? Like...you realize if he actually cared he could get in your house _without_ keys?) Others wouldn't. Depends how sensitive your personal information is; or in the locksmith analogy, to what extent you consider your valuables irreplaceable. Seems kind of silly to expect every layperson to operate to the same security standards as a security professional. My mother does not have credentials to dozens of business systems on her phone; she has pictures of her cats and _maybe_ a credit card account stored somewhere.

<comment><USER5> The locksmith analogy breaks down fast: the locksmith can enter into your house if he really tries, but Apple can not enter into your phone without your help (if it can, it's utterly broken)

<comment><USER6> Remember Apple (the organization, not some random 'Genius') has code that runs as root on all Apple devices and can remotely update that code.

> but Apple can not enter into your phone without your help

Of course Apple _can_ \- that is why the FBI asked them to do just that. Apple _won 't_ as a matter of principle, not due to any technological limitation.

<comment><USER5> > Of course Apple can - that is why the FBI asked them to do just that.

If they can, it's broken. Do not buy those devices.

<comment><USER4> You are hopelessly naive. Do you have some method for independently verifying Microsoft and Google cannot remotely access their respective consumer OS's that you'd like to share with us?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know, this feels like a case of "you're going to have to let the plumber into your house if you want him to fix your broken toilet." If you're buying Apple products and asking for support from them, you're implicitly trusting them anyway. Apple likes to advertise their security greatly; but in fact, I think "we own you so you can be protected from everyone, including yourself" is probably closer to the truth.

<comment><USER8> Following the plumber metaphor, at least we were able to monitor plumber's action and it affects mostly the toilet. While what apple is doing is more along the line of "give us the key to your house, we will fix your toilet"

<comment><USER9> People put plumbers/babysitters/cooks/helpers/professionals of various kinds in their houses that they don't monitor.

<comment><USER10> Plumbers (reputable ones, anyway) are generally bonded and insured so that customers know they will do what they say they will do without causing undue damage (see [https://www.angieslist.com/articles/hiring-contractor- whats-...](https://www.angieslist.com/articles/hiring-contractor-whats- difference-between-bonded-and-insured.htm)).

Does Apple provide any insurance to protect/reimburse the customer if a Genius misuses their access to the customer's device?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a really bad piece. The alarmist tone is not appropriate. News flash: when you give a stranger your phone, they have access to your phone!

The hyperbole is shady. I like some of troy's work, but this post just further exacerbates the "Chicken Little" stereotype of Security Advocates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Although I find the title and tone of the piece a bit meh, he still had a point: Apple is targeting non-tech users who are not familiar with backups, let alone infosec. It is Apple's responsibility to ensure the safety of the data they're asking for, which as the Brisbane news he's pointing to indicates, they're not doing.

<comment><USER4> 'A bit meh'? This might be the most hyperbolic headline I've seen on here in years.

The users Apple is 'targeting' (an odd choice of words; most would use 'customers' here) mostly don't do anything so sensitive with their phones that they need to worry about bad actors within the company which sold them their phone in the first place. In the rare instance where some Apple tech starts stealing nude photos or credit cards, they will be fired, probably prosecuted, and the customer will recover. Big whoop.

<comment><USER12> Linked in the article: [http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/apple- store-photo...](http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/apple-store-photo- ring-scandal-in-brisbane-privacy-commissioner-weighs-in-20161013-gs1d83.html)

>The Australian privacy commissioner will call on technology giant Apple to explain reports of staff stealing, sharing and ranking of customers' explicit photos.

I have no idea why people think this is a crazy hypothetical. _Of course_ some techs will look at your nude photos. And in this case, copy them, post them online, and rate them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know about the author of the article, but personally I would be even more worried if I handed a locked phone over to a tech and they said "Oh, don't worry about giving us the unlock code - we have ways to get around that easily..."

The fact that tech guys cannot easily get into a locked iPhone actually gives me better peace of mind.

At the end of the day, as others have said - It's like handing over the house key to a tradesman, or your car key to a mechanic (I do both on a routine basis, once I have vetted the other party). End of the day, it is about making their job as easy as possible, and some semblance of trust is required if humanity is to keep moving forward.

I wonder what the author would say if he went to his employer or a client site to diagnose a network issue and they refused to give him any admin passwords. Sure you can diagnose a DNS or firewall issue without the domain admin password, but having it surely makes the job a LOT easier and quicker.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. I found it odd that he claims to be a security guy yet repeatedly says Apple should have some way around a locked phone. No solution offered in the article...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > if there's a hardware issue that requires the device to be taken "out back", > then there should be a means of diagnosing faults on a locked device.

A dangerous suggestion.

A better policy might be for Apple to _require_ it's users to backup all their data, wipe the phone clean and hand over an unlocked device. After getting back the device, you could sell it on ebay, like OP suggested, or wipe the device clean in case you suspect malware was installed and continue using it.

<comment><USER16> There's a catch though. Some settings don't get carried over to iCloud (I recently upgraded to iPhone 7 from iPhone 6), and for many heavy users the free iCloud storage is not enough for backup nowadays.

<comment><USER17> And that's assuming all the sync and backup worked well, which even on day-to- day use between and iPhone, iPad and Mac can be a bit of a pain (pictures not syncing, etc.) Given their insane means, I don't know how Apple manages to fail at providing at least working cloud/sync services, let alone performance in that regard. But there it is, iCloud services are a dumbed down mess that _may_ or _may not_ work.

<comment><USER16> And overwrite is automatic. I don't think there's even snapshot feature so in case of some horrible incident I can retrieve back the old version. I could be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Huge help he's giving his son by teaching him basic security practices, but also how to type on a damn keyboard.

I volunteer with an engineering education camp over some summers and kids are totally unable to do anything with a normal computer. We try to start teaching them programming through writing minecraft mods and we require that kids have a little bit of experience with minecraft, but half the kids that come in have NEVER used a computer that wasn't an iPad. In their lives. We have to show kids how a keyboard works, and they're point of refrence is the virtual one from a touchscreen.

<comment><USER19> Wow how old are these kids? That makes it sound like we're a generation away from using tablets 100% in place of generalized desktops.

<comment><USER18> I never took data down but I'd say most are in the 10 to 12 range, with a couple outliers above that. Next to no kid below 10 has touched a keyboard.

I don't live in a tech-y area either, and the kids come from a lot of diverse backgrounds. It's just that kids first introductions to computing is always an iPad. Makes the job of educators a lot harder :/

<comment><USER19> Believe it or not that makes me worry a little less. My keyboard classes didn't really start until 7th grade I think. Tablets are great. My guess is they're easier to lock down for kids, but also expose kids to modern concepts (passwords, websites, idk what else). Its probably fine so long as they sooner than later learn to type. Now, there's the worrying number of hunt and peckers I see in the IT department at work...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would love for the iPhone to have a "guest mode" for the times you need to loan the phone to someone for a quick call, and that would work for Apple Store diagnostics as well.

<comment><USER21> You need to explicitly turn off "find my phone". Not sure the exact reason why, but I know that it has something to do with iOS security.

<comment><USER22> find my iphone locks the phone's serial number so it can't be wiped / activated with a new account. turning it off allows the phone to be re- activated under a new itunes account

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Last time I needed an iphone repaired (a 1 hour in-store screen replacement), they asked me to write down my passcode on the repair authorisation form! They also seemed really offended when I said I'd rather erase it instead.

Apple could do a much better job in this department.

<comment><USER24> Anecdata: I've always insisted on wiping devices over providing passcodes/passwords and I've never gotten any negative vibes about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am not sure why this article is raging. Before I go into the Apple Store for a hardware issue, I backup my phone, and just erase it. They usually take an hour or so to fix it and I just restore it and I am up and running again. Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER26> He explains it later on in the article:

      I could have wiped it there and then, handed it over and later restored from last night's iCloud backup,
      but I don't like not having a fully working outgoing device before doing a restore to a new one.
      I also don't like the lag time due to poor Australian internet and
      whilst I could have driven home and done a local backup to iTunes,
      there's still the need to reconfigure a bunch of things that don't cleanly restore

<comment><USER9> > _but I don 't like not having a fully working outgoing device before doing a > restore to a new one._

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwvlbJ0h35A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwvlbJ0h35A)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So many people are missing Troy's point and suggesting that he could wipe the phone, or you can trust apple like you trust a plumber.

It's a hardware problem. Can't Apple as the hardware manufacturer create a sandboxed service area on your phone where they and their genii can do diagnostics? Does it really take every person with a hardware issue to either hand-over their entire device unencrypted or wipe the device before giving it to the manufacturer for maintenance?

Imagine if you could let a plumber into your house, but they could only see the plumbing! They would have no access to all the goods in your house. Isn't that what we should be aiming for with technology? Don't try to put real world constraints where they shouldn't exist. I can already create a sandboxed 2nd user on my device, why can't apple do this themselves, just for them, with the correct hardware or whatever. Or why doesn't apple recommend people do this before handing over the phone.

</comment><comment><USER28> Several years ago, I took a white MacBook in to the Apple Store to have it looked at. The white plastic around the front corners had started to crack and chip off. It didn't affect the functionality at all -- it was only cosmetic -- but I wanted to get it fixed.

Apple said they'd have to send it off to fix it. It'd be about three weeks before I'd get it back and, yes, they'd need my password -- to fix a purely _cosmetic_ issue.

The next day, I took it to a local AASP and showed it to them. They said they'd order the part, get it the next morning, and I could pick it up the next afternoon. No, they didn't need my password.

When I went back to get it, they had fixed it and it was just like brand new. Oh, and they had ran some type of diagnostic tests on it, found that the DVD drive was failing, and went ahead and replaced that for me too -- _without my password!_

It was all covered under AppleCare and I didn't have to do the backup/wipe/restore dance.

</comment><comment><USER12> I found this article it links to more alarming: [http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/apple-store- photo...](http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/apple-store-photo-ring- scandal-in-brisbane-privacy-commissioner-weighs-in-20161013-gs1d83.html)

>The Australian privacy commissioner will call on technology giant Apple to explain reports of staff stealing, sharing and ranking of customers' explicit photos.

I think this is important, because all the comments so far are about how this is a crazy hypothetical scenario that no one should be worried about. It's not.

<comment><USER29> Exactly. With Apple's track record, the author has every right not to trust Apple with his device's security, no less so because he is in security himself and regularly gets notified of hacks / data breaches - presumably on his phone. Australia Red Cross Blood Service and Cap Gemini being the two most recently published.

He is _not_ being alarmist; it may only take a few rotten apples to spoil the barrel, but boy did it get spoiled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> My laptop was accidently switched up at the PDX once. I was coordinating to have it shipped back and the lost and found employee asked me to provide my password to prove that the laptop was mine. I had to insist on providing the full serial number a couple of times before she agreed.

</comment><comment><USER31> > _Genius (and I 'll be using that term sarcastically from here on in)_

Slightly off topic, but it really bugs me when people ridicule these workers who are just doing what they've been instructed to do. Seems to happen all too often when discussing the Genius Bar.

<comment><USER32> I think he's ridiculing the names "Genius" and "Genius Bar", not the workers.

<comment><USER31> Maybe, but it can easily be interpreted as mean spirited, and added nothing at all to the discussion.

A Microsoft MVP probably shouldn't be throwing shade at another company's marketing term.

<comment><USER29> Seems to me it is rather agnostic, entirely directed at the fact that with "Genius" comes certain higher expectations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I mean, I agree with the premise, but is handing over a locked phone to an untrusted third party any better than an unlocked one? Doesn't physical access always mean game over? If they know they're returning the device to you, can't some sort hardware interception, keylogger, or listening device be installed inside the phone?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNetsec/comments/2ehk06/why_does_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNetsec/comments/2ehk06/why_does_physical_access_immediately_mean_game/ck0gef2/)

</comment><comment><USER9> > _It 's a hardware fault and no, I can't give it to you unlocked, I'm a > security guy and I think about these things._

Yeah, because they will be magically able to test it and fix it while locked...

/facepalm

</comment><comment><USER34> That hasn't been my experience at Apple at all. After the "has your phone been wet" interrogation, they've suggested that I wipe the device.

</comment><comment><USER35> Doesn't match any experience that I've had with the genius bar.

In all cases that I can remember I've been told when making the appointment to back up the device prior to the appointment and every time the device has had to go into service the genius person has had me wipe and factory reset the device in the store before they take it off me.

Anecdotal for sure, but so is the original article.

</comment><comment><USER36> > _Genius: Uh, no, we need it unlocked._

Tell them you are okay with them not being able to run diagnostics on completing the repair; yes, you understand this may leave the device badly calibrated. Don't waste time arguing; escalate until you get someone who will accept your locked phone.

I go through this every time I use Apple's Genius bar. Only once did I have to wipe, and that was with a Mac.

<comment><USER37> On Mac you can enable Guest Mode which does the trick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is this article really using both "think of the children" and "Apple is terrible" to get people riled up?

You can back up to iCloud and reset the phone. When getting it back, log in and wait 30min, everything should be there.

You can't diagnose hardware problems without access to the software and any limited "service mode" is just a backdoor in waiting.

</comment><comment><USER39> Provided they really do require authorization to perform any actions on the phone.

That would prevent anyone from modifying your phone without your permission. Such as flash the BIOS or something more malicious. Again provided authorization is required to perform those actions.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just wipe the phone & hand it to them. It doesn't take long to reset all content & settings. Restore it (from the backup you made right before leaving the house. You DID back it up before leaving, right?) as soon as you get home.

</comment><comment><USER40> Fundamentally flawed article; stupid.

The author doesn't seem to get that if Apple could run arbitrary software on a locked phone, THAT MEANS IT IS NOT SECURE TO BEGIN WITH.

<comment><USER41> do you imply that an iPhone is not secure ?

<comment><USER42> No they're saying arbitrary code execution on the phone would be insecure, perhaps in a slight misunderstanding of what the article suggests, but true nonetheless.

I too am wary of a diagnostic partition/back door as an answer to this conundrum as it seems like it just introduces another vector for attack. We can say "just make it secure" or "don't give it access to do malicious stuff, but the nature of jailbreaks on the iPhone rely on bugs in otherwise innocent functions. Jailbreaks are just exploiting the phone security.

The author seems to be of the opinion that there should be a hardware test that doesn't require actual access to the phone, which is probably true -- they likely could just swap the speaker in this case and call it a day. But many of the hardware components are integrated on the iPhone and I'm not sure there's value in a dedicated speaker test device or a limited hardware test device like that. Similarly, quality testing afterwards would best be done before handing it back to the customer; it's pretty lousy service to hand back a fixed device for it to just not work again, and at some point to ensure that you've solved the problem you need to get into the phone.

I don't know what the full answer is here since the core problem seems to be Troy doesn't trust Apple. As others have said, you give up your car keys when you get your car repaired. You let the plumber into the house. At some point trust has to be there and people need to be held accountable for violating that trust. Geeksquad violated that trust without real penalties multiple times, so it's a legit fear. But Troy seems really intent on distrusting Apple -- that's fine, but he needs to realize how that's in direct conflict with how support works. Does he insist the same security on his car? (Ie, no keys for the mechanic?).

As for a solution, maybe an iPhone onsite imaging tool, some small microboard attached to a raid box that quickly pulls an encrypted image and stores it temporarily on site. The tech can test it on a vanilla and then restore for the client. I don't know if this would violate the iPhone security though being able to restore the image...

<comment><USER43> I read it more as that he does trust Apple (who could remotely update his phone with backdoors, read his iCloud contents or ..., but likely has strict controls in place against this), but he doesn't necessarily trust a random individual Apple employee who has unlimited and unsupervised access to his phone. Especially since there are documented cases of store employees copying photos, less so of Apple actually compromising user data if avoidable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I agree that it's not the best case that Apple needs to bring it "in the back" and to need to unlock it but if you can access the phone's diagnostics from outside the locked phone done it's already insecure. The fact that even apple has to have me unlock my phone tells me that not even their diagnostic tools work outside the lock screen. That sounds beautifully secure to me. And I agree with userbinator in that "you're going to have to let the plumber into your house if you want him to fix your broken toilet.".

</comment><comment><USER45> Funny, he doesn't care it's full unlocked iPhone backups being uploaded to Apple servers and freely accessible. It's not like there is full iMessages, iPhotos and other App Data in it!

<comment><USER43> Freely accessible to random employees, without anything in place to prevent that? Source for that claim?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Suppose I submitted this story with the following headline:

"Microsoft MVP has problems with Apple's security policies"

The article is actually a good read. I think the message needs to reach everyone - although I am sure the irony is not lost on the people with slightly longish memories about Microsoft's security track record till very recently.

In any case, I am sure someone would come in and change the headline and ask me to cut down the hyperbole and focus on the message.

This exact response needs to be sent to bloggers who write these click-baity headlines. The fact that some of them are experts who do know what they are talking about actually makes it more cringe-inducing, not less.

Oh, and no, the developed countries do not make up the entire human race (even if people in insular Australia might sometimes think so - see what I did there?), and many many people in the rest of the world don't even have Apple devices.

<comment><USER47> It is somewhat ironic that he quotes a tweet about Surface being repaired in sight without asking a password, when MS now forces all kinds of telemetry and spyware on their OS.

Edit: You can add to insult that a MVP has a problem with a genius... Oh this is a nice story!</comment></comment>


New Concept in Software Testing: Introducing the "Bug Video" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getbugcam.com

<comment><USER2> While maybe not a completely new concept, this does have some thoughtful features.

Like he says, a picture does say a thousand words. Sometimes there are bugs/behavior that are either difficult to describe or simply much easier to understand when presented with a video. I once recorded a short bug video for Airbnb when I saw odd behavior on their homepage in one browser and not in another, and I used Screenr to do this, which you can see here - <http://www.screenr.com/IYq>

Using Screenr was simple but does have differences from what he seems to be proposing, namely ease of use and secure sharing. Screenr was easy enough to use but I did have to log-in. To have a typical user provide feedback and even go to the trouble of recording a video, it would make sense to allow anonymous uploads or simple one-step registration. And with Screenr there doesn't seem to be a way to have private videos (like YouTube or Vimeo) so I had to publish it to my profile (at least back in December).

By making it very simple and painless to record and submit a video, and by making submitted videos private only to devs, a service that packages all of this for either software development or consumer facing websites could be a successful endeavor. Best of luck to them!

</comment><comment><USER3> The article goes on to say that it's not a new concept. What they're suggesting is basically screencast.com linked in a bug report. Good idea, but all the necessary parts are already built</comment>


Computers taught how to detect eye disease in 'jaw-dropping' breakthrough - <AUTHOR> https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/computers-taught-how-to-detect-eye-disease-in-jawdropping-breakthrough-a3910231.html <comment><USER2> my jaw has dropped because of this breakthrough</comment>


Twitter could end up being really profitable. But it's a super risky stock. - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/04/twitter-could-end-up-being-really-profitable-but-its-a-super-risky-stock/ <comment><USER2> I wouldn't consider it this risky. Twitter is the second largest social network and in fact very different from competition. Facebook showed there are enormous amounts of money to be made from social, it just takes some time to figure it out and I'm sure Twitter can.</comment>


Which payment solution for my business? - <AUTHOR>

Hey, I need a robust/simple and reliable solution to charge my website's users (developped with Rails). I need to do a recurrent payment and my business is based in France. So I tried Paypal which I like but not available for recurrent payment outside US/UK. I had a look to chargify.com but they don't support foreign currencies/credit cards/merchant account. I just discovered spreedly.com which seems to support foreign countries but I don't know anyone who had already tried it. So, do you have feedback on spreedly or another good idea to accomplish it ? <comment><USER2> I use authorize.net for my billing. I think they're pretty standard. They have a recurring billing API. If you want to do the whole "store credit card" thing, without storing CC info on your servers, look into their Customer Info Manager product.

Their APIs are OK, mediocre documentation, Ok sample code. Not great, but they're a standard.</comment>


China surpasses Japan in nominal GDP, now 2nd largest economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/08/china_0

<comment><USER2> "China Has Long Been the World's Second Largest Economy"

[http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/china- has...](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/china-has-long- been-the-worlds-second-largest-economy-nyt-kills-electrons-for-nothing)

</comment><comment><USER3> Flagged. There is a already a robust discussion of this story here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1606517></comment>


Lessons about age discrimination learned from a mother - <AUTHOR> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2004/07/09/lessons-about-age-discrimination-that-i-learned-from-my-mom/

<comment><USER2> Great post!

I especially liked, "Why is he stuck at my level at his age?" Probably the first thing most people think.

Then again, does anybody ever wonder all the things that may have gone wrong in this person's life, through no fault of their own? Even with family issues, illnesses, accidents, and many kinds of financials setbacks, some older workers show how resilient they can be.

Thanks for the reminder.</comment>


PageSpeed Insights with local server - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/denar90/psi-ngrok <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I added new one with related keyword. I'd like to remove this one but I can't...</comment></comment>


What Will China Do When America Owns Greenland? - <AUTHOR> https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-will-china-do-when-america-owns-greenland-75481 <comment><USER2> There's an air strip there and its apart of NATO. Whats the point of buying it, bully imperialism to our own ally? Wha? What does the atlantic have to do with China to boot. The pacific is the key lol.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing. First it will never happen and second, why would China even care? They don't.

</comment><comment><USER4> Try to buy Taiwan?</comment>