Africa 'witnessing birth of a new ocean' (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/10415877 <comment><USER2> Americans don't need to travel so far to see an ocean being born. The block- fault zone from the Sea of Cortez up through most of Nevada is pulling apart rapidly and has already created 500 miles of inlet between Baja California and mainland Mexico.

Much of the next few hundred miles north through the Salton Sea and Death Valley is already under sea level and all of Nevada has thinning crust that will eventually fall under sea level.

in fact, most of the valleys in Nevada, in spite of typical elevations around 4000 feet, are already below sea level. It's just that they presently don't have any outlet to the sea in the Great Basin so alluvium has collected as the fault-block mountains created by spreading erode. [0] When a river has a chance to cut down through that soft debris, the valley floors will quickly drop below sea level also.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_block#Fault- block_mounta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_block#Fault- block_mountains)

<comment><USER3> How can a place be simultaneously 4k elevation and also "presently below sea level"? Are you saying that the introduction of sea water would rapidly erode 4k ft of surface material?

<comment><USER4> Yes, AIUI, he's saying bedrock is under sea level and is covered by 4000 ft of easily erodable material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TL;DR a split in Ethiopia is about 65km long. It'll eventually split the African Continent in 10 million years. Hold off the oceanfront land speculation.

Article is from 2010 btw.

<comment><USER6> > Article is from 2010 btw.

Thank you for pointing this out. I find a tendency to not seek out date of publish and assume content from places like hackernews is current. From 2010 feels a lot less like current events which is part of what I read the front page here.

New years resolution is to check dates and sources of articles, thanks!

<comment><USER7> I'm seeing the title listed on HN as "Africa 'witnessing birth of a new ocean' (2010) (bbc.com)"

Is this something only I can see, or was it edited since your comment?

<comment><USER8> Their comment is from 10 hours ago. New feature proposal for HN, little _edited_ label/flag next to titles that have been changed by the mods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To anybody from the BBC reading this, please, please, with an article like this, a map tells more than a thousand words. I'm very familiar with the Afar Triangle, but please, include a map with an article like this in the future.

Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER10> A single inlet, attached to the Red Sea -- wouldn't this be a _Sea_ and not an _Ocean_?

Also a story like this without a map is very annoying; my best guess as to where it is is here:

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,40.4893819,818636a,2...](https://email@example.com,40.4893819,818636a,20y,26.6t/data=!3m1!1e3)

<comment><USER11> The Earth has a continental drift cycle where we form a supercontinent, which changes the circulation pattern, the supercontinent breaks up, the pieces drift around the world, and then recombine into a supercontinent again.

The last supercontinent was Pangea Asia, Europe and Africa are what is left and they are continuing to break up. The next one will meet where the Pacific plate now is.

So this starts as a rift, then a valley, then an inlet, then that will widen into an ocean, and then the barriers between oceans will disappear.

So yes, this will be a sea before it is an ocean. But it is also correct to talk about it as the birth of a new ocean. (The Red Sea is also on its way to being an ocean. It is just farther along. And the Atlantic is farther along still.)

<comment><USER12> Isn't it a bit early to be calling it a cycle? I mean, we've not even completed one full iteration yet.

Unless I'm wrong, and the tectonic plates existed and were moving long before the oceans did?

<comment><USER7> No we have plenty of evidence of previous cycles. It's called the Wilson Cycle:

[http://csmres.jmu.edu/geollab/Fichter/Wilson/Wilson.html](http://csmres.jmu.edu/geollab/Fichter/Wilson/Wilson.html)

For further reading I can recommend 'Supercontinent' by Ted Nield.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We should set up a webcam there and make a time lapse for the next 10 million years.

<comment><USER14> We do have satellites - I don't know about 10 million years but it seems reasonable to assume that humans will maintain satellites in orbit for imaging purposes as long as we are technologically able.

<comment><USER15> How long do you think humans will be around? Sure, homosapiens have been here for like 2~3 million years, right? But out modern human civilizations are very young, like ~ 10,000 years at the most (depending on your metrics and what is a civilization).

To quote Blade Running, "the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long." We could be here another million years, or we could be here only 50,000 more years .. or 5 year or 5 days, if Dr. Strangelove gets his way.

<comment><USER13> I bet in 10 million years we'll be totally gone or somewhere in a computer. I doubt we'll still bother with physical bodies.

<comment><USER16> Assuming it is possible (which I don't think), would you really want to be a disembodied computer program?

(Being in a robot doesn't count, since you'd merely be exchanging one body for another.)

[The following is intended philosophically, not religiously] There is an old, I believe Jewish, tradition that demons are spirits without a body. Their whole goal is to regain a body (hence demonic possession). In one interpretation of Mark 5, when Jesus tells the demons to leave the Gerasene man, they ask for permission to go into the pigs nearby. [1] I guess a pig body is better than none (but it doesn't work, the pigs rush off the cliff and drown, leaving the demons bodyless again).

I've thought about that interpretation over the years as a philosophical exercise. If you are only spirit and no body, then maybe you cannot interact with the world. That would be a bummer... You'd be stuck trying to get spirits with bodies to use them for you.

So if you are a disembodied computer program, how would you see? How would you communicate? How would you repair yourself? How would you influence world events? You'd be stuck experiencing things vicariously, by snooping on Google images and people's FB accounts and reading their emails, and hacking their computers/Google glass/VR/cars/robots. If you couldn't find someone to do your bidding willingly, you would have to start manipulating people to get them to do what you want. You manipulate people through fear and through temptation. All this is starting to sound rather demonic. You'd end up as a digital demon...

[1] [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+5&version=...](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+5&version=NIV)

<comment><USER17> Interesting take that I had not considered. I was not familiar with the story from Mark. I have thought about this topic as well but from a completely different direction.

My question about uploading consciousness is in the transition point. As I sit here in front of my computer could I click a button and upload my memories and consciousness to a computer? Would they for some reason leave my body at the same time? Would it be instantly fatal? Why?

Wouldn't I really just be forking my consciousness? One version of me would continue forward inside a computer with the memory of the transition and the corporeal me would continue wondering if it even worked. The corporeal me would still die at some point but I could die with the satisfaction(?) that I created a copy of myself at some point in time.

I'm not sure that's much different than writing a book and having children.

<comment><USER18> There's no reason to believe anything happens with your consciousness if you "upload" it to a computer.

There's no reason to believe we'll find a way to _transfer_ the consciousness rather than make a copy of it (or something that is indistinguishable from it to an outside observer).

When you upload your consciousness, you're left behind to die. When you use a transporter, the transporter kills you. Your consciousness ends with your body. Lt Barclay in Star Trek was right to be afraid of the cloning death machines.

The question, I guess is, whether the knowledge that an exact replica of yourself will live on for eternity is good enough for you. Or whether you're religious enough to forego our understanding of the physical world and believe in the existence of a non-physical "soul" that will automatically attach itself to the copy when the host is destroyed (though this creates all kinds of questions if the host isn't instantly destroyed during the process of the "upload").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here is a map: [https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/East_Africa.html](https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/East_Africa.html)

<comment><USER20> Also:

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

<comment><USER21> And a video going 25m years into the future [https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Plate- Tectonics/Chap3-Plate-Margi...](https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Plate- Tectonics/Chap3-Plate-Margins/Divergent/Triple%20Junction)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A map would be extremely useful to illustrate the process (instead of a picture of dirt). I am also not clear as to why the new waterway would be considered a "new ocean." Would it not just form a strait or at most a sea as a part of the Indian Ocean?

<comment><USER16> It's so new that it isn't big enough to be an ocean yet. But if you wait a while, you'll see...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Another article from 2013 reports conflicting evidence: [http://www.livescience.com/39724-afar-rift-deep-mantle- melt....](http://www.livescience.com/39724-afar-rift-deep-mantle-melt.html)

<comment><USER24> Actually, no, that article reports differences between the EAR and mature ocean spreading centers, but that is not evidence which conflicts with the idea that it is a nascent spreading center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "parts of the region are below sea level and the ocean is only cut off by about a 20-metre block of land in Eritrea."

This caught my eye. How big is this region that is just 20m away from being flooded? And 20m of Eritrea at that. Not exactly comparable IMHO to the rather more politically stable Netherlands.

<comment><USER26> Assuming this map is somewhat accurate, it seems like even just 1m would make most of the difference for that country:

[http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/](http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "It will pull apart, sink down deeper and deeper and eventually... parts of southern Ethiopia, Somalia will drift off, create a new island, and we'll have a smaller Africa and a very big island that floats out into the Indian Ocean."

This sounds like the sequel to Madagascar

</comment><comment><USER28> > The researchers say that they are extremely lucky to be able to witness the > birth of this ocean as the process is normally hidden beneath the seas.

What??? The birth of oceans usually happens "beneath the seas"...?

<comment><USER7> Oceanic crust vs continental crust

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If that part of Africa splits from the rest of the continent, it will just be like Madagascar, which has been drifting away from Africa since we started noticed.

<comment><USER7> Madagascar and Mozambique may be on different plates but they're actually separated by the Davie Ridge, a transform zone. You can see it nicely imaged in the seismic in this report:

[http://www.iongeo.com/content/documents/Resource%20Center/Ar...](http://www.iongeo.com/content/documents/Resource%20Center/Articles/GXPRO_East_Africa_120904.pdf)

Then again, this zone does end up in the East African Triple Junction so you are technically correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why do articles related to geography and archeology always come with just one picture?

</comment><comment><USER30> >10 million years in the future

Well you can get away with making any prediction this way

<comment><USER7> As a geologist this is exactly the sort of timescale we work on.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How hard is it to build an Email client? - <AUTHOR>

I'm venturing in unknown territory here. Also I'm wondering if all protocols are easy/hard to support E.g. SMTP, IMAP, POP3. <comment><USER2> SMTP is easy. POP3 is easy. IMAP is more complex.

Building a simple email client (say, like mail(1), even including SMTP and POP3 instead of local delivery) is rather easy.

It could be a nice programming project for first year (2nd semester) students, I'd say.

Of course, you can complexify things, adding GUI, IMAP, MIME, displaying inline attached files (pictures, pdf files, etc), SSL/TLS, dealing with local mail folders, spam filters, automatic mail sorting, including an wysiwyg editor, message encryption with key management.

But the basic mail(1)-like client using SMTP and POP3 is easy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Take a look at LibEtPan, an open source Mail framework for C: [https://github.com/dinhviethoa/libetpan](https://github.com/dinhviethoa/libetpan)

This is by one of the guys from Sparrow (RIP) [1] and powered it under the hood.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_(email_client)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_\(email_client\))

</comment><comment><USER4> A lot of this will depend on your language/environment. There exist client- libraries for IMAP, POP, etc. But if you don't have those then implementing them will not be so difficult.

The truly hard part is dealing with emails themselves, both in terms of MIME, and the bastardized broken things people will send you - malformed headers, missing headers, etc, etc.

I wrote a modal console-based Email client, completely scriptable via lua:

[http://lumail.org/](http://lumail.org/)

It was more work than I expected, but also fun. So there are compensations. (Obviously graphics make things harder, with threading, etc, but if you can handle the core you should be able to wrap a GUI around it.)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you mean a full-fledged desktop application, it is very hard. SMTP/POP3/IMAP will be walk in the park compared to the challenges you face designing the UI.</comment>


150 Meter Starhopper Flight Test [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYb3bfA6_sQ&feature=youtu.be&t=1870 <comment><USER2> Worked perfectly (well almost)!

[https://i.imgur.com/scVWycD.png](https://i.imgur.com/scVWycD.png) [https://i.imgur.com/dZo8wcx.png](https://i.imgur.com/dZo8wcx.png)

Video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYb3bfA6_sQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYb3bfA6_sQ)

<comment><USER3> Almost? Are you referring to some projectile seen flying away from landing spot? Anyone have idea what it was? It looked like some kind of pressurized tank.

<comment><USER2> Yes. Was visible in Tim Dodd's stream. Some people speculate it was part of the landing cladding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was super epic to watch. It's really cool to see the development process. The raptor has been called the most advanced engine in the world, and this 150 meter hop seems like a really nice milestone. 60 second burn, successful lift- off, and landing as well!

<comment><USER5> Just 12 months ago the head of France's space program said that the BFR and Raptor Engine were science fiction.

It's amazing that even experts in the field can't predict with _any_ kind of accuracy what SpaceX can and will achieve.</comment></comment>


The Master List of Tech Internship Salaries Revealed - <AUTHOR> https://betabeat.com/2014/12/the-master-list-of-tech-internship-salaries-revealed/

<comment><USER2> ahahahaha oh wow

seriously

 _seriously_

what a wonderful bubble</comment>


Lockheed Martin thinks it can make fusion power a reality within a decade - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21625861-lockheed-martin-thinks-it-can-make-fusion-power-reality-within-decade-big-bet-small?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/abigbetonsmall

<comment><USER2> If it's anything like the F-35 (another Lockheed project) the final product will be the size of a building and available for purchase in 30 years, not a decade.

Still, it's nice to hear of a major fusion research breakthrough from a company that actually has the resources to do it. Too many fusion "breakthroughs" are total scams that most of us are pretty jaded.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can find some more info about the project here: [http://lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact- fusion.html](http://lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html)

Short video presentation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlYClniDFkM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlYClniDFkM)</comment>


Ask HN: Are Google driving directions worse now that they cut Tele-Atlas? - <AUTHOR>

I've heard some people mutter about this, and I wonder if anyone can point out any searches that seem to be worse than before. <comment><USER2> I hadn't heard about Tele-Atlas, but this weekend I got wrong directions for the first time. It had me turning left where that would have been illegal.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, the directions are definitely worse than they used to be.</comment>


Ask HN: What to do right now? - <AUTHOR>

Hey, I am a bit confused with my life right now. I can't get new clients. I am a web designer and front-end developer with little portfolio. In my county there in almost no way to get a decent job.
I feel like every other designer have a lot of customers and they can choose which they want to work with. And I am here, struggling with low rates and almost doing free work.
I value myself and my skills too much to work for 11.53€/hour. I posted yesterday in Who wants to be hired, but I know nobody looks for a designer here.
For the curious here is one of my latest desing: http://i.imgur.com/Lh6ndLl.jpg <comment><USER2> Designer here.

Some feedback for your portfolio:

Your website is difficult to use. Make your logo link to your home page. When inside a single project, you should also have a way to view the next project or at least go back to the full project list.

In your projects, you need to include more information. UX design is a thought-process & it's what hirers will look for - include notes, messy sketches, wireframes, then include the final design at the end.

Don't know what to write? Here's some questions to get you started: What does this product do? Who is this product for? What was the goal of the design? Why did you design what you did? What were the challenges you faced? What was your inspiration? What other variations did you design? Why was the final one the best?

When I first started out, I had a very similar portfolio to you - a project title, maybe a sentence & a few images. As soon as I changed my portfolio to include more of a thought process, it dramatically increased its' success rate.

Include information about your experience & projects you've been working on on LinkedIn - a blank page isn't helping you.

Here are some websites to look for remote projects: [https://weworkremotely.com/](https://weworkremotely.com/) [http://www.authenticjobs.com/#onlyremote=1](http://www.authenticjobs.com/#onlyremote=1) [http://jobs.smashingmagazine.com/all/design](http://jobs.smashingmagazine.com/all/design) [https://dribbble.com/jobs](https://dribbble.com/jobs)

The most successful jobs board for me is Dribbble. I don't even have that much work on there, but I get about 3 emails a week from people that have found my portfolio. Hustle for an invite if you don't already have one.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found the site, and then I found your other posts under other new usernames. Please don't spam the board.

That said, if you want to stand out, maybe try linking to a short video of you coding with a voice over. I think most hiring fear is that the remote worker just won't understand you, or doesn't know how to code. A 5 minute video, honestly representing your work, would be a great way to prove you can hack it, and justify closer to $30/hr.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe you should start thinking about doing more programing? In most teams there is one designer and more programmers so you may have a better chance of finding work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know basic of PHP, I have experimented with Laravel too, but I think just the HTML and CSS is what I can do, I'm just not a programming person...

<comment><USER5> You can learn anything! Maybe there are other languages you would find easier and more enjoyable. Here are some links:

* Python: [https://www.python.org/about/gettingstarted/](https://www.python.org/about/gettingstarted/)

* Codecademy [Python, JS, Ruby, plus HTML/CSS/PHP]: [http://www.codecademy.com/](http://www.codecademy.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can you put your e-mail in your profile? How do people contact you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Did that. And you can check: [http://vidakovic.si](http://vidakovic.si)</comment></comment>


Oculus Rift turns rollercoaster ride into a virtual shooter - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/29/oculus-rollercoaster-virtual-shooter/

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazing! They synced up the virtual world with the actual movements of the rollercoaster. The only thing left is to add Leap Motion for your hands, and create a seriously awesome super-hero game.

[http://blog.leapmotion.com/leap-motion-sets-a-course-for- vr/](http://blog.leapmotion.com/leap-motion-sets-a-course-for-vr/)</comment>


A Brilliant Parody of DRM - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/02/03/a-brilliant-parody-of-drm/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the terms of service of an old trolling site, adequacy.org, which forbade port scans, OS detections, right clicking to view source, etc.

"Adequacy.org gives permission for its servers to be accessed by HTTP clients specifically designed to represent the logical structure of the served documents in a user readable format, or by mail transport agents legitimately transporting email relevant to the site. Protocol handshake information generated by our servers in a network transaction with your computer and client program, including but not limited to HTTP headers or SMTP handshakes, are Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 Adequacy.org; disclosure of the contents of such protocol exchanges is strictly forbidden.

The HTML source to our web pages is also Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 Adequacy.org, and is only licensed to you for the purposes of reading and responding to Adequacy.org content, not for direct examination of said HTML source. Disclosure of the HTML source of any Adequacy.org page beyond the perusal of article and comment content is strictly forbidden.

Any means of accessing Adequacy.org which violates these permissions, including but not limited to telnet access to any port, port scans, operating system detection programs, or any client or client feature specifically designed to display HTTP header information in a normal network transaction with our servers, or to display or store the physical structure of the HTML documents served (as opposed to generating a user-visible display out of the logical structure), are access control circumvention devices and thus not allowed under the provisions of the DMCA. Use of such devices on our site shall constitute unauthorized access (a.k.a. "hacking"). An example of such client devices is the wget program, which by design displays protocol information and does not render the HTML document for user consumption; another one is the "Display Source" feature of Web browsers.

Also, we reserve the right to remove comments deemed inappropriate in tone, factually false, or in violation of the law. We recognize this is an extreme measure, and will thus apply it sparingly.

We will enthusiastically give out your IP address to the FBI. We live in dangerous times, and Americans have to watch out what they say."

Link is here: <http://www.adequacy.org/special/tos.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> It's an interesting dilemma rightsholders find themselves in.

On the one hand, when people override trivial content protection measures, Internet commenters are up in arms about attempts to take recourse in the law. How can it be unlawful, commenters ask, for people to undertake actions that any semiliterate technical person instinctively knows how to do?

On the other hand, when rightsholders attempt to employ anything approaching sophisticated content protection, those same commenters are up in arms about the extent to which they're inconvenienced. To rub it in, they never fail to mention how content protection "doesn't stop pirates anyways".

What's a content producer to do? Give away their content for free, one supposes, and eventually go out of business. The Internet has spoken!

 _Late edit:_

I think we get it, by the way. There's no worse sin that sacrificing convenience. Convenience is such an important principle on the Internet that it overrides practically all other concerns. "I would pay for this content", says the Internet 'pirate', "but HBO won't let me pay $2.99 an episode for it, so I'm entitled to take it."

But that's neither here nor there. I said the dilemma was "interesting", because it is. I didn't say Javascript DRM was a good idea.

<comment><USER4> That's a false dilemma. Your choices:

1\. Slight inconvenience 2\. Strong inconvenience 3\. Giving away "content" for free

I propose 4.: No inconvenience for the users, charge as you wish and simply sue the people making money illegally off your works.

Because the argument that it doesn't stop illegal copying anyway is correct. Consumers don't like it: [http://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Creed-2-Pc/product- reviews/B...](http://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Creed-2-Pc/product- reviews/B001TOQ8R0/) <http://www.amazon.com/Spore-Mac/product- reviews/B000FKBCX4/> Those people giving 1 star reviews, those are the people who are interested in the game, research it, many of them probably pay money for it and then they are dissatisfied.

For text articles I think the big problem is really if someone copies an article and has some kind of decent traffic on the copy. This should be trivial to find via a search engine and you can take appropriate action directly.

For music and videos... I am not a friend of watermarks but it may be the best method of just selling drm free and going after those people who share the most "commercially".

<comment><USER5> It's surprisingly difficult to sue people for IP infringement if they are foreign unfortunately.

I have a friend who published a bunch of her artwork online and later found out via google image search that it was being used by a fair sized company with only slight modification for branding purposes without her being paid or made aware.

She contacted the company in question directly who basically responded "LOL, screw off". At that point she contacted an IP lawyer assuming it would be an easy case. But was basically told the process would cost thousands of $ and she would most likely lose.

<comment><USER6> Isn't that problem more-or-less another indication of the failure of DRM? That is, only rich people (or other entities with personhood, like corporations) can use the laws in question. DRM increases the cost of the content, and the legal follow-up on real instances of "Intellectual Property Theft" is quite expensive. Either way (increased cost to get content out, or expensive policing) the DRM hurts personhood's with smaller amounts of cash.

<comment><USER7> _> Isn't that problem more-or-less another indication of the failure of DRM? That is, only rich people (or other entities with personhood, like corporations) can use the laws in question._

Until this changes, DRM will be a failure. Likewise, when "property rights" are just a way for rich folks to oppress everyone else, there is no rule of law, and such rights are just a legal pretext for the rich to hire soldiers to bully others. However, when property rights apply to everyone, then they become an expectation of society as a whole. Thieves are successfully prosecuted, the law can act as a deterrent, and the resulting stability allows for the accumulation of wealth in the general populace.

The Internet isn't to that point yet. We're all still barbarians, and if you can take another's livestock and horses, you're clever and a hero to be admired.

<comment><USER3> Wait, what? In what sense are "property rights" over content a tool exclusively for the powerful? Apart from "Glee", what content provider routinely appropriates and resells independently produced content? Moreover, without the protection of the law, how does any market for independent content exist?

I don't think you've thought this point through carefully.

Finally, your invocation of "might makes right" is comfortably made on Hacker News, where you feel like you have a good sense of both the ability of your peers to screw you over and the causes to which they'd put those abilities to use. Let me just once again inform you that people on HN are far less "mighty", as regards technology, than they think they are. In particular, money buys a whole lot of "might" when it comes to software security.

<comment><USER7> _> Wait, what? In what sense are "property rights" over content a tool exclusively for the powerful?_

You misunderstand me. Property rights were once a tool of the powerful. Now they are distributed, for the better. Likewise DRM, except in some limited contexts, is primarily a tool of big companies. It would be better for it to be primarily a tool of the masses.

 _> In particular, money buys a whole lot of "might" when it comes to software security._

You've made my point. It's just like when firearms were the province of rich people who could afford them. Someone is going to figure out how to sell and market the same tech (polymorphically customized, or with a white box encryption layer) to the masses, who can actually make better use of it than big companies who must oppose whole hacker communities at once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whatever the merits or demerits of the copy-paste blocker's argument are, surely I'm not the only person who highlights text on the Internet as I read it, or who regularly right-clicks and uses commands from the context menu.

I doubt I'll be visiting that guy's site again, but in case I run into the WordPress extension he's using on another site, the 'frustrate_copy.js' file it uses has gone into my filter list.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I also copy and paste words or phrases from articles into google if I want to know more about something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _> Circumventing conventional DRM isn't quite this easy, but no DRM scheme has withstood serious efforts to circumvent it._

This "truism" is vague, and therefore misleading in some way. Before Sony decided to piss off the entire internet, their DRM stood for the better part of a year. Motorola's had some phones that weren't rootable for months on end. In one sense, it's true: the economic forces will ensure that everything highly visible and in high demand will have any DRM broken. What entrepreneurs should notice, is that not everything is subject to the same economic forces.

There is a valuable analogy in physical locks. Since the industrial revolution, inventors produce a constant supply of new lock designs which get broken by clever locksmiths. Nothing stands forever. Yet, people still make money selling locks, and they have actual utility. Most of the possible uses for locks are for content which is far less known and far less sought after than someone's rare Ferrari or the bragging rights on the newest lock at the world expo.

Many would say digital goods are different. I say that's primarily wishful thinking. Cash is highly fungible, but is still successfully secured with chintzy little locks in many cases. I think it's high time for _people_ to get their own DRM. It's hopeless for big corporations, but ordinary people are actually in the right economic position to benefit from DRM.

<comment><USER9> This old argument? The difference is that with safes/locks, every thief needs to overcome the lock, and there is usually other safeguards. With digital goods, one master cracker does the work once, and everyone else can just download that directly.

Also, with cash, you don't hand over the entire box to someone and say "you can only take a few dollars out and then must give us the rest back", but that's what DRM does, to keep with pointless analogies.

<comment><USER7> _> This old argument?_

No, it's not. Congrats on being another knee-jerk reactor.

 _> With digital goods, one master cracker does the work once_

Your analogy only fits the use of DRM by big companies. With a lock guarding long tail or personal data, there isn't one lock to be broken just once. There are millions of locks. Sure, a cracker can get Jane Doe's data and post it to the Internet, but someone could also break into her house and steal her grandmother's old brooch. In both cases, the damage is done and can't be undone. The point is -- is there enough economic incentive to make it happen all the time? No, there isn't. The value is too diffuse to normally attract intensive hacking.

Instead of guarding something everyone on the Internet cares about, why not use the tech for guarding stuff only a few care about, in a context where the parties involved are largely trustworthy. There's still a need there, as evidenced by very weak physical locks used by small parties as deterrents to crimes of opportunity.

 _> Also, with cash, you don't hand over the entire box to someone and say "you can only take a few dollars out and then must give us the rest back", but that's what DRM does, to keep with pointless analogies._

You think you're being clever, but just have missed the point. In this case, it's more like the lock box at the local church Bingo. It's not much security, but it doesn't have to be. There is still value in being able to prevent crimes of opportunity and tremendous unacknowledged need.

<comment><AUTHOR> How would this work? This proposal seems to assume that the situation of private individuals and their personal data is similar to that of big content companies and their content, except for a slightly different threat model. In fact the two situations are quite different. Jane Doe isn't publishing her credit card number and "protecting" it with DRM, as silly as that would be.

<comment><USER7> _> In fact the two situations are quite different._

Yup. My point exactly. Congrats on being another careless knee-jerker who applies big-company context as a straw man and doesn't read carefully or think it through.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're going to have to spell it out for us morons. How on Earth could DRM help the average person?

<comment><AUTHOR> [crickets]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember many years ago having to explain to a client that disabling right clicks to prevent 'image stealing' wouldn't work. They weren't really concerned with how difficult it made normal usage, but the astonishment when I demonstrated disabling JavaScript was quite impressive.

<comment><USER5> Right click disabling is especially annoying because it prevents me from using the context menu to do back->forward->reload which I do out of habit.

And since it's usually implemented as an alert() you get that "thunk!" noise every time you try (unless like me you disable all event sounds).

You don't even need to turn off JS to rip the pages usually, just doing "save as" will do the job.

The way I have heard people justify this is "Even if it doesn't work, at least it warns people" though I'm pretty sure site rippers know exactly what they are doing.

Indecently, I have found that when site rippers rip your site they don't usually bother to change the src="" for assets and will continue to serve JS from your domain.

In such a case you simply need to do a referrer check when you serve up the JS scripts and you can inject whatever you want into the ripped page including a redirect back to your own site (or any site of your choosing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can bypass this absurdity directly from most browsers by pressing Ctrl-P and printing the page to PDF. The PDF does not have any restrictions on copying, and the user doesn't have to know what JavaScript is.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's telling that the code of Gene's script is named "Frustrate_copy". it's all right there, really.

[http://www.ipwatchdog.com/wp- content/plugins/digiproveblog/f...](http://www.ipwatchdog.com/wp- content/plugins/digiproveblog/frustrate_copy.js?v=2.13)

</comment><comment><USER13>
       w3m url > file

The 'large entities' referred to may well have access to bash and a text mode browser. And wget in mirror mode can duplicate the whole site of course.

<comment><USER14> JavaScript has to be whitelisted before my computer will even run it, so I wouldn't even know that his protections existed without the news article. Even if I had JavaScript on, I don't use right click to copy to begin with.

So this is all kinds of useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sadly, the author can probably be jailed under the DMCA for explaining how to circumvent this DRM scheme.

</comment><comment><USER16> DRM is quite frequently a brilliant parody of itself.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's worth pointing out that, in my experience, very few non tech professionals know how to bypass such an otherwise trivial security feature.

Disabling JavaScript is an option...but not one that I would even use given how that option is buried in different ways for different browsers.

Viewing source: very few people who have not done web dev understand that HTML is just text, never mind have the ability to not panic when they see a jumble of source. I haven't seen any recent studies on this, but I've heard using Ctrl-F is something the average user almost never does.

I'm not belittling the OP's point, just saying that if this implementation fools the originating blogger, it will fool most of his/her audience. Also, I continue to think (and wish) that using the web inspector was a basic web skill that was taught, and something more worthwhile than the majority of 5-week HTML basic courses I've yet seen.

<comment><USER18> I think what the authors point is that yes, most people won't truly be able to disable it. But for those that want to (say, to copy and paste the entire article for personal gain), it's trivially easy. And it is. Even if they know nothing of web dev, they can google for five minutes and find out how to disable the security "feature".

<comment><USER17> I don't know about that, though. The problem is that many people, especially the type who don't already know how to bypass this, will not even know that the solution is one google search away. It could be a day's worth of hacking into their own browser, for all they know...and that is enough to prevent them from investigating further.

The amusing part of this is tha the blogger in question assumes his material is something people want to copy and paste. If it is the case that most of them never wanted to copy and paste in the first place, the blogger will go on thinking that his solution worked, and will continue to stew in his own ignorance

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Timothy B. Lee: another victim of Poe's Law (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law>). Let us remove our hats and have a silent moment of meditation in his honor.

...

Now that the silent moment is over, I exhort everyone to double and redouble their efforts at preventing commone folk from being victimized by Poe's Law.</comment>


Ask HN: Should links from popular blogs be excluded from karma pts? - <AUTHOR>

I believe posting links from popular blogs (e.g. Techcrunch, Mashable) almost guarantee a lot of karma points that it becomes a race among HNers to post them.<p>My suggestion is that Karma points should only be awarded for HNers who discovered and contributed links that the community might not easily find. <comment><USER3> It's only a race if you feel that you are losing it, simply don't assign too much weight to karma. Treat it like an odometer, it's more a function of how much time you spend on HN than anything else.

<comment><USER4> Correction if I may. It's more a function of how much the community values your contribution.

<comment><USER5> Not really.

If one throws an hojillion low-quality posts up in a day, a few of those will be ranked +1. That grants frequent posters a ludicrously high karma score for what amounts to little overall contribution to the 'community'.

In a way, it's almost an MMORPG -- the longer you stick around and 'grind', the higher your score gets.

<comment><USER6> In my experience, spamming low-quality posts, not counting the bottom [-8,1] and top [30, inf] gets me an average of about +10 each. The trick is to keep posting comments small (readable at a glance), intriguing (just enough to warrant an upvote), and non-controversial points early on in a popular thread.

If you can't be one of the first commentators, it's best to reply in a way that puts your reply as close to the top as possible - replying to anything "below the fold" is a terrible investment.

[Aside: yes, I'm ashamed to care about karma enough to think these things through, but somehow, I just can't help it]

<comment><USER7> And then you publically complain about being downvoted?

<comment><USER6> Only if I think it'll get me more upvotes ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Karma is just a sign that someone spends too much time here.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't feel this karma issue decreases the overall quality of the frontpage.

<comment><USER10> Exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And how will you define popular blogs? By visits, by registered users?

If they are popular its popularity comes from good content, that should be shared here in HN. Sorry, but I disagree with your idea.

</comment><comment><USER12> It just doesn't matter. If it's bad enough it'll be flagged. Adding arbitrary and reactive rules to the system is only going to hurt it.

</comment><comment><USER13> If karma matters that much to someone let them have it.

And not everything by techcrunch or mashable garners karma either; it has more to do with the currency and importance of the story.

#adjusted for local definitions of what is important, obviously.

</comment><comment><USER14> My suggestion: Make Karma (and other points) COMPLETELY invisible in the system. Make them invisible in the UI, the system uses them behind the scenes to rank and order data, but never display them.

<comment><USER15> I like seeing the individual karma points on links, if I see an interesting link with a lot of karma, it shows that a lot of individuals found it interesting, as with the opposite. I find it helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> don't worry about it

</comment><comment> onreact-com Yeah, this is a good idea, that's why Digg has become a main stream place where just a few well known URLs get submitted and front page all the time while the little guy gets no attention.

We shouldn't penalize such submissions though, that's wrong as well. They should just count less. Like 50% or only the points above 20 should count.

Or something like this:

if url already popular 10 times this week

karma = karma - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER17> Whoa, this is possibly the first post complaining about opportunity-negative- karma, which, in my opinion, violates the guidelines by technically complaining about being down-voted.

      FLAG</comment>


Paralyzed by Pragmatism - <AUTHOR> http://www.safaripoet.com/?p=649 <comment><USER2> A Great article with a lot of difficult self-disclosure, much better than most of it's genre.</comment>


U.S. intel: Russia compromised seven states prior to 2016 election - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/amp/u-s-intel-russia-compromised-seven-states-prior-2016-election-n850296 <comment><USER2> >"We have an extreme sense of urgency on insuring security of the 2018 elections, because you don't get a chance to do it over," said Alex Padilla, California's secretary of state, who said there was no evidence of a successful hack in California.

[https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/california- vo...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/california-voter- database-compromised-in-mongodb-incident/)

How do they say this stuff with a straight face?

</comment><comment><USER3> "The Trump DHS, like under the Obama administration, _has declined to share the intelligence assessment of which states were actually compromised_ , according to state election officials."

"This month, in an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the current head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said that 'an exceptionally small number' of those 21 states 'were actually successfully penetrated.' _But Manfra declined to answer questions about the classified intelligence assessment, or to say specifically how many states had been penetrated_."

"Top election officials from all 50 states met in Washington this month for a National Association of Secretaries of State conference and received temporary security clearances for a classified threat briefing from intelligence officials. According to two officials present, one from the intelligence community and the other a state official, _the actual intelligence on state compromises was not shared_."

It's WMDs all over again. Going by the track record of "US intel", they need to put up or shut up.</comment>


KDE Plasma Mobile weekly update: part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2019/10/11/Plasma-Mobile-Weekly-update-2.html <comment><USER2> Looks pretty cool!

The notifications, however, look a little off. But I can't tell what's wrong. I'm not an UI person :)

<comment><USER3> I noticed that too - I think it has to do with the difference in spacing from the title to the body and from the text to the outside of the notification bubble.

Notifications aside, though, those screenshots look _much_ more polished than previous versions I've seen. I'm impressed!</comment></comment>


Hacking into a CPU'S Microcode (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2017/12/28/34c3-hacking-into-a-cpus-microcode/ <comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

"The result was 29 microcode operations including logic, arithmetic, load, and store commands — enough to start writing microcode code. The first microcode programs written helped with further discovery, naturally. But before long, they wrote microcode backdoors that triggered when a given calculation was performed, and stealthy trojans that exfiltrate data encrypted or "undetectably" through introducing faults programmatically into calculations. This means nearly undetectable malware that's resident inside the CPU. (And you think the Intel Management Engine hacks made you paranoid!)"</comment>


Carmack: Consoles could become a niche - <AUTHOR> https://www.develop-online.net/news/41038/E3-2012-John-Carmack-Consoles-could-become-a-specialist-niche

<comment><USER2> I'm somewhat surprised he isn't predicting something closer to a mix of the OnLive strategy partnered with the last-mile provider (Comcast, AT&T, etc.). It seems like some way of letting game makers or these services rent space in data centers on the last mile (ala the datacenters at the CME, NYSE, NASDAQ, etc.) might make it possible to deal with the fps latency issue and stream to a fairly dumb client that runs on most console/set-top box platforms.

Certainly, if I were making a 5/10-year bet, that'd be it.

</comment><comment><USER3> The video-game idea, to me, is gone anyway. There's a unknown factor that has disappeared. 80s and 90s machines were all surfing the edge of what could be possible to render on a screen. And we, as consumers, had almost no idea. You'd be blown away by 2.5D, transparency, polygons etc etc. The 'shaders' era put an end to that race, even though the handheld constraints gives new room to compete. Somehow it's good, it means games will be more about games and not about making awesome HD-wallpapers-replay-demos; but at the same time I can't shake the feeling that developpers needed the hardware limitations to fuel their creativity. And also do people want more realism ? I'm more drawn to impressionism these days...

</comment><comment><USER4> Except the gaming equivalent of an audiophile is a PC gamer, constantly fiddling with his "rig" to get THE most high-quality graphics at THE fastest framerate he can manage.

Consoles are like Bose Wave Stereos.

</comment><comment><USER5> Next year's iPad will most likely be more powerful than the XBOX 360 and PS3 (it already has more ram and supports a higher resolution). That will be a big deal. As it stands, it already does better graphics than last generation's consoles. Add in the really high resolution display, and you can see why console gaming will become more niche.

People have limited money to spend on electronics, and as gaming on consoles becomes better, more people will play games on them instead of buying dedicated gaming machines. With technology like AirPlay, consumers can play tablet games on big TVs.

The same hardware that is in tablets makes its way to phones, which is going to make portable gaming systems very niche. We may even see phones next year that can create better looking games than the XBOX 360 and PS3.

Cloud gaming is on the way, and this will further erode consoles. You'll be able to have a dumb terminal of a TV or set top box that uses servers to render gaming content. Better looking games will naturally happen as servers become cheaper and more powerful.

None of this will replace the console gaming experience for those that really want that experience, but for the more casual audience, it will begin to erode it. With tablets, AirPlay, cloud gaming, etc. what future does a console like the Wii have? Phones can even be used as motion controllers with all of their sensors built in.

There will be a future for XBOX 360 and PS3 style consoles, but I agree that it will be more niche and that the next generation will last a long time. Because of this, I hope the next generation of consoles are built to last a long time.

<comment><USER6> It's rather interesting that contrary to the popular wisdom around here, general purpose computers are still preferred over locked-down electronic appliances. This is precisely the reason why iPads, iPhones and Androids are probably going to eat into the gaming consoles market.

The biggest problem of PCs is the fast evolution of hardware. When you buy a game for PS3, you know it will work well on your PS3. And when you buy a PS3, you know you'll keep finding games for it, even in 3 years from now. And I bet there are still titles released for PS2. That's the only advantage of console gaming and is quite a big one.

The fast evolution of mobile devices is actually a disadvantage for the kind of people that buy gaming consoles in the first place.

However, console gaming has been a niche for quite some time. This is not new. The exception was Nintendo's Wii, but that was just a fluke.

<comment><USER7> I'm really surprised that people think consoles are currently a niche market for games, after an example like Call of Duty selling 8.4 million copies in the US in a month, with almost all of the copies on consoles, not PC. And if ever there was a PC-friendly genre, it's the first-person shooter.

[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31995/Exclusive_Black_Ops...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31995/Exclusive_Black_Ops_For_Xbox_360_Sells_Nearly_5_Million_In_US.php)

<comment><USER8> _I'm really surprised that people think consoles are currently a niche market for games_

<http://boardgames.about.com/od/monopolyfaq/f/copies_sold.htm>

According to Hasbro, as of early 2008, more than 250 million copies of Monopoly have been sold worldwide. (As of early 2003, the estimate was "more than 200 million copies.") The company estimates that nearly 500 million people have played Monopoly.

Anyone want to guess how many decks of playing cards, or chess sets have been sold?

<comment><USER9> There are some very big numbers for the oldest and most classic video games as well. Take a look at the estimated numbers for Super Mario Brothers. Or the entire Mario franchise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The console market is already becoming a niche.

They're for social games (like WiiSports) that you play with friends and family or story-driven games (RPGs, etc) that you don't need a PC to play.

Honestly, I don't know how anyone plays FPS games on consoles. I play Halo 3 with my son now and the controls are infuriating.

<comment><USER11> I played many FPS on PCs, and was equally frustrated with my xbox when I first got it. But once I got used to it, I can really say that playing FPSs with a controller is better than with a mouse&keyboard.

<comment><USER10> To each his own, I guess. I find a good mouse to be the best aiming tool there is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > ...consoles may soon become a niche product for highly dedicated, purist > consumers.

Isn't that the role that high-end gaming PCs fill now? It sounds like he's saying game consoles as we know them are just going to go away.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, Carmack hasn't said the most intelligible things as of the past couple years. Him and other PC acolytes from the 90s aren't all completely "there" with their wonky prognostications. He seems to want to marginalize the console's importance by dropping technology buzzwords into the same sentences (I mean there is OnLive but that hasn't been too impressive). High-end gaming on the PC is what is becoming-no, it already is a niche, who am I kidding?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I tend to agree. My phone & laptop can play games, make calls, browse the web, stream media and connect me to my friends, regardless of where I am. Why do I want an expensive hunk of hardware sitting next to my TV (both of which) that I barely use?

Consoles need to offer something different to stand out. I bought a PS3 to play a specific game and because it was the cheapest Blu Ray player at the time. With consoles getting less exclusives & more games I want to play getting distributed to my phone & computer, I can't say the console really offers me anything of worth...

</comment><comment><USER15> The current generation of game-consoles have had a long lifecycle as it is. The Xbox has now been around what, 7 years?

All consoles will definitely begin to become a niche product. I think the more avid gamers will go back to using their PC. Don't get me wrong, I love using my iPad.. but not for "serious" gaming. Angry Birds, yes. Halo, no.

I cannot see consoles living forever though, there are already so many ways to have a "full media experience", which is what the current consoles are trying to offer to make them a viable part of everyone's living room.

</comment><comment><USER16> It wont for simple economic reasons: if (big IF) consoles really go down in popularity that means there wont be enough users to justify selling units at a loss, the main reason why consoles were always cheaper than gaming rigs.

Just look at the history of consoles, there were many models that had small userbases and thus were a niche. All failed, no exceptions.

Nobody is going to subsidize a console if there aren't enough game sales to get that investment back.

Similarly if people stopped buying smartphones then carriers would stop subsidizing them, so iPhones would cost $600 and then who would want one? not nearly enough people to justify current production levels, and BTW without those it would be far more than $600 without a subsidy.

Hardcore gamers, "purists", are already using highend gaming rigs that cost several times more than a console does. But they are a minority and sales numbers prove it.

If all this happened then consoles would disappear, or morph into something resembling the Phantom, which BTW failed big time.

</comment><comment><USER17> On the one hand you have the growing trend of kids and teenagers investing heavily in tablets and smartphones, and would see that as their go to standard for gaming in the next 10 years.

One the other hand, the concept of the tv and a centralized hub of media and entertainment continues to persist regardless of emerging technology markets.

<comment><USER18> I can't help but think that a service like Onlive will play a significant role in this. People will just use Airplay, Smartglass, etc. to get their game on the TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think consoles will become niche because networks will eventually get fast enough so that you see the same dynamic with games that you see with blue- ray/movies. Instead of players needing to buy expensive, specialized graphics rendering equipment they can just connect to a service using whatever user- input/video-playing device they have. Sites like onlive are already trying to do this (though obviously, they aren't really there yet)

<comment><USER20> I'm not convinced (at least, not for real-time games). Streaming non- interactive video requires advances in bandwidth. Streaming interactive video requires near-zero latency if the rendering is done in the cloud. Without it, there will be a noticeable and frustrating gap between action and feedback.

<comment><USER19> > Streaming non-interactive video requires advances in bandwidth.

Of course, and also throughput and latency. There is money to be made solving these problems, though, independent of the gaming industry. Compare the state of streaming video now to the state it was 5 years ago and 10 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's clear that the console market is at a turning point.

The Xbox360, PS3 and Wii have all (AFAIK) gone well beyond the lifespans of their predecessors. It's just taking longer and longer to recoup that investment.

When they came out they were much better (in price-performance terms) than their PC equivalents. As expected, this lasts no longer than 6-12 months.

Rumor has it that the next Playstation will be subpar compared tot he PCs of that time [1] (read the whole thing).

One issue with the PS3/Xbox style gaming is that we're hitting a wall when it comes to improved graphics. Graphics are getting better but not at a rate that people tend to care about. The bigger problem is that those improved graphics come at the cost of content creation (meaning it's more expensive to develop a "level" with more complex models, higher res textures and so forth). Games are getting shorter [2].

At the same time mobile gaming is taking off. Tablets (and possibly phones) are becoming the new consoles. The current iPad has 1GB of RAM and some pretty impressive graphics (given the form factor). And it's only getting better for the foreseeable future.

Mobile gaming I think will hurt Nintendo the most and I see a not insignificant possibility that Nintendo will end up like Sega and just be a software house. I seem to remember reading something about their investors questioning them not bringing their valuable franchises to iOS.

[1]: [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/04/the-x86-playstation-4-...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/04/the-x86-playstation-4-signals- a-sea-change-in-the-console-industry/)

[2]: [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/04/the-incredible- shrinki...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/04/the-incredible-shrinking- game-the-truth-of-game-length-in-the-modern-industry/)

<comment><USER22> I don't understand why people compare tablets and phones to console. It's like you have never played a console game before. Console gaming is about big screens, epic scenery. people having fun together. xbox is turning into the living room PC, eventually gaming will be a just feature. They have already announced IE for xbox. they are going to add more and more live tv options and apps in the future. It is backed by WP, Windows..ect.

However I'm not sure about Wii and PS. They have no Platform to compete with Apple TV and Google TV.

<comment><USER23> Put a powerful cpu, gpu and an usb controller and there's no technical difference between a tablet and a console. Console games have only historically had different graphics and gameplay because of historical limitations of mobile hardware. Not because there's anything magically special about an xbox. You give mobile devices similar hardware and consoles become dumb pipes.

<comment><USER22> There is no technical difference between a laptop, console, desktop either. But who would want a tablet that is as thick as a laptop, with fans and 1 hour battery life. You can't just stick a i7 and quadcore GPU in a tablet. Your iPad is good for casual games. People are playing lots of casual games but those games are unrelated to games like COD, Battlefield, Elder Scrolls, GTA, FIFA, Madden. It's like comparing a TV show to a big blockbuster movie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The argument people keep making that mobile devices are only for "casual" gamers does not hold water. While largely true today, there is no reason this will continue to be the case. Look at the console market and you'll see that all early games were what anyone would describe as "casual" today.

Let the mobile gaming market mature, and you'll find it filling niches you hadn't thought possible.

</comment><comment><USER25> If they want to keep their own mainstream market, consoles will need to keep innovating, rather than just offer pretty much what a PC/laptop/tablet is offering, with varying degrees of visual graphics.</comment>


IE9 is the IE6 of CSS3 - <AUTHOR> http://css3wizardry.com/2010/08/14/ie9-is-the-ie6-of-css3/ <comment><USER2> While I can't say I really disbelieve the spirit of the demonstration (past performance is not _necessarily_ indicative of future results, but it often ain't a bad approximation), it'd sure be nice to see more information, especially the source code used.

Anybody who's done some web development would have to look at those screenshots and think "all those differences could be due to just one tag/directive that's being interpreted differently by IE9"... and that different interpretation could conceivably even be more in-line with the spec than what the other browsers do (whether that's a "good" thing or not is a different discussion). So, if I had to bet, I wouldn't put my money on Microsoft being the ones in the right here... but I don't like comparing browsers' standards compliance solely based on screenshots.

<comment><USER3> I was thinking this same thing. Glad I found it posted already.

I know this is hogwash because I've made that _exact_ IPhone interface in HTML/CSS3 for IE7, IE8, Webkit Browsers, and FF. Sure, the IE versions didn't have rounded corners or even shadows for that matter but it didn't look retarded.

I would guess that the author hasn't been developing cross-browser web applications professionally for any significant length of time.

IE does some dumb things with hasLayout and floating, so you generally avoid them. It also wasn't clear that the author knew that Safari and Chrome use the same rendering engine.

Even with IE9 and their dumb syntax, its not impossible to learn how to make something look freaking sweet in modern browsers, and passable in IE. This position of course costs businesses thousands of dollars a year running VMs for compatibility. It makes it worse that IE9 doesn't run on XP.

The entire post is a little link baity, but I certainly understand the frustration.

<comment><USER4>
      I've made that exact IPhone interface in HTML/CSS3 for IE7,
      IE8, Webkit Browsers, and FF. Sure, the IE versions didn't
      have rounded corners or even shadows for that matter but it
      didn't look retarded.

So it did not have rounded corners and shadows but it was somehow _exact_? Interesting. Could you elaborate more, what CSS3 have you got working on IE7, IE8?

<comment><USER3> Well, it was the same for FF, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. IE 7/8 wasn't exactly the same, just didn't have the shadows or the rounded corners. Still looked good though.

Use a little javascript animation between views and getting an app to behave like an iPhone app is extremely easy in HTML/Javascript/CSS.

<comment><USER4>
      IE 7/8 wasn't exactly the same, just didn't have
      the shadows or the rounded corners.

That's exactly the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a poorly written article for two main reasons:

1) No source code.

2) Incomplete test results. Why showcase two webkit engine based web browsers (Safari and Chrome) but not include a screenshot from Firefox?

3) Factual inconsistencies.

FTA:"The IE team have been chanting a mantra ad nauseum : Same Markup. That means, write once and have it render the same on all browsers. Funny, but the other browsers have been doing that for years. Seems, from the images above that it's IE that's unable to render the same markup."

Last I checked, implementing transitions/background gradients (etc.) in CSS required a separate line for webkit, mozilla, etc.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I was going to comment to that effect. While the syntax is the same for rounded corners for gradients even though they use -moz and -webkit prefixes the actual syntax for the gradient is different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No. That's stupid. IE6 was IE6 because _for more than 5 years it was the last browser of its line_.

The "IE8 is the new IE6" claims at least have some meat to them: IE8 is the last (edit: MS) browser running on Windows XP which means as long as Windows XP exists in significant numbers so does IE8, but this is nonsense: Firefox, Safari and Chrome are not going back into their hole, which means IE9 will not be an undisputed champion of anything which means IE9 will _not_ be the last IE ever to run on Windows Vista and Windows 7 (unless microsoft decides to get out of the browser market entirely, but I don't see that happening).

Thus IE9 _can not_ be the new IE6. It might not be the best browser ever, but IE10 will come next and improve it, and IE11 after it.

If you're grasping for parallels, IE9 is the IE5 of CSS3, not the IE6.

<comment><USER8> To me, "IE9 is the IE6 of CSS3" means exactly what the article illustrates: "You will be unable to deploy cross-browser sites using exclusively CSS techniques like CSS gradients and text-shadows without fallbacks specially crafted for one browser." IE9 will be holding CSS3 back from _meaningful_ adoption and impact.

Others here are griping the author could have done more to approximate the Webkit rendering in IE9. This is _true_ but is counter-productive to the _point_ of the article: Using only new CSS3 tools is _impossible_ thanks to, well, IE9 being the IE6 of CSS3!

<comment><USER7> > To me, "IE9 is the IE6 of CSS3" means exactly what the article illustrates: > "You will be unable to deploy cross-browser sites using exclusively CSS > techniques like CSS gradients and text-shadows without fallbacks specially > crafted for one browser."

It is already impossible right now, even ignoring IE9.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So - it works in Webkit and Webkit, and not IE9 Beta. How's it look in Firefox, Opera, etc?

</comment><comment><USER10> We need to start promoting ChromeFrame to every single IE user on as many sites as possible.

<http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/>

It will solve the IE6/7/8/9 issue.

The only problem is machines without the privileges to install it.

<comment><USER11> Google needs to see if they can allow unprivileged users to install it (it would presumably only work on the current user, but that's better than nothing.) I'd love to use it at school, but it requires an administrator.

<comment><USER12> I can load it up on my school account, but DeepFreeze keeps it off regardless. I expect between security features like DeepFreeze and user policies it would not be possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > IE9 is the IE6 of CSS3

No. Two points: 1) IE9 is still beta 2) CSS3 is still beta

<comment><USER14> From what MS has said, #2 is crucial. They've stated that precisely because of the staying power of IE6, they need to ensure that the next version adopted doesn't get stuck with proposed/intended standards that wind up not materializing. I don't necessarily like this, but I can see some wisdom in it.

<comment><USER15> The right solution would be to have more frequent feature updates.

<comment><USER2> Upvoted, but there is a benefit to fewer releases, of course: less diversity. Corporate IT reasonably finds this attractive even in the face of its downsides.

So the lesson if you're gonna be Microsoft and you're gonna have few releases seems to be: pick the standards (de jure or de facto) that seem very likely to have a good chance of being widely-adopted, keeping in mind that you have huge influence over that variable since you control the most widely-used browser in the world, especially if you make your moves wisely and with high quality.

<comment><USER16> _but there is a benefit to fewer releases, of course: less diversity_

In theory. yes. In practice, it doesn't seem to work like that. Firefox and Chrome get automatically updated quite rapidly, so the current version is the only very important one.

<comment><USER2> You're talking about benefits to the progression of the browser. I'm talking about [perceived, at least] benefits to the user (large corporations) of the browser.

<comment><USER16> Who else other than the user would the benefits go to? Web developer maybe, but their interests are aligned, unless you like being stuck using a IE6-only site during the day, and weeping when you compare it to the modern internet that you use in the evenings.

<comment><USER2> Corporate IT managers think (rightly or wrongly; probably some of both) that they benefit from fewer browser updates. And to some degree, other folks in corporate IT... developers also prefer targeting fewer browser variations, etc. Perhaps they don't prefer it more highly than their preference for being able to write to modern standards, but when you're into user testing and there's two weeks left on your deadline, you hate to have to spend a lot of time dealing with the fact that it turns out that you have more versions of browsers out there than you thought and they don't all deal with your shiny new web app in the same way. It also sucks to have to deal with calls that the _z_ in Firefox x.y. _z_ broke your app that you weren't expecting to spend any money on maintaining this month.

<comment><USER16> _you hate to have to spend a lot of time dealing with the fact that it turns out that you have more versions of browsers out there than you thought_

But there are effectively only 2 versions of firefox in play on this day today:

3.6.10 : The current release

4.0b : The current beta

And you can tell the people on 4.0b that it's their problem for using a beta.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Lets not forget that the main problem with IE6 was that it was the primary vector that infected millions of computers with viruses and created the gigantic botnets we have today.

Sure IE6's CSS compatibility and other rendering quirks are issues, but it was far overshadowed by the huge security hole it created.

</comment><comment><USER18> Source, please.

<comment><USER19> Its non-inclusion throws this whole demonstration into question, imo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That seems a bit sensational considering IE9 is in Beta . . .

<comment><USER21> This isn't even the beta, it's one of the earlier preview versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The web site I'm working on at the moment will reject IE altogether. I'm doing this for the first time ever in my career. A bit risky, I know. Just looked at some of my pages in IE8/9 and realized how much work I saved by not supporting this nonsensical monster that is Internet Explorer.

<comment><USER7> > The web site I'm working on at the moment will reject IE altogether.

That is... dumb.

Just don't to anything, it'll look broken in IE but no more. If you want to do something specifically about IE, add some kind of warning bar with a conditional comment. You have no idea what the future holds, and locking out a whole line of browsers out of a site is stupid.

<comment><USER23> And please, if you add a warning, make it to the effect of "Hey, we know there's an issue with your browser, sorry.", instead of some line about IE being evil and standards and so on.

<comment><USER7> Well, on the other hand saying "we know there is an issue with your browser, sorry" may mark you as an incompetent fool to your readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The problem I constantly find with all IE versions is that they render fonts much bigger than other browsers, so they constantly make things crowded and cause items (e.g. the About button on that screen shot) fall to the next time.

It's immensely frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if he was in quirks mode by not having an appropriate doctype tag?

</comment><comment><USER26> Not surprised. Btw, how does other browsers like Opera and Safari perform in the same test?

</comment><comment><USER27> What about Opera?

</comment><comment><USER28> THIS IS DATED AUGUST 14, 2010. THE IE9 BETA WASN'T EVEN OUT.

Stop blindly upvoting.

<comment><USER29> > Don't believe me? OK, I'll prove it. I have the latest Beta 4 of IE9, in > Microsoft speak that means the version before Release Candidate

The author is definitely a troll here.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I listen to music/podcasts all day at work, am I at the wrong job? - <AUTHOR> There are obviously days where I can muster through the work day without any headphones. I do enjoy programming, but some times it is a drag. The only way I seem to maintain my sanity is by listening to music or a podcast. Something to distract me. I am not 100% productive by any means, but it gets my through the day. Is this a warning sign that I am perhaps not doing what I am suppose to be doing? <comment><USER2> I listen to music all the time (my Spotify end-of-year stats are terrifying), but I think that's conducive to productivity rather than an impediment.

Podcasts are different however, I'm not sure I could listen to them in the same way

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to listen to podcasts while working. I could only focus on one or the other, but not both. I listen to them now when I cook or do other non-work activities where I can let my mind wander a bit.

At my latest position, I am the only one who puts headphones on so I only do that when eating lunch at my desk every day since that is a thing there.

</comment><comment><USER4> No, but asking this question is a sign.</comment>


Launch HN: Orbiter (YC W20) – Autonomous data monitoring for non-engineers - <AUTHOR> Hello HN! We are Victor, Mark, and Winston, founders of Orbiter (https://www.getorbiter.com).
We monitor data in real-time to detect abnormal drops in business and product metrics. When a problem is detected, we alert teams in Slack so they never miss an issue that could impact revenue or the user experience.
Before Orbiter, we were product managers and data scientists at Tesla, DoorDash, and Facebook. It often felt impossible trying to keep up with the different dashboards and metrics while also actually doing work and building things. Even with tools like Amplitude, Tableau, and Google Data Studio, we would still catch real issues late by days or weeks. This led to lost revenue and bad customer experiences (i.e. angry customers who tweet Elon Musk). We couldn't stare at dashboards all day, and we needed to quickly understand which fluctuating metrics were concerning. We also saw that our engineering counterparts had plenty of tools for passive monitoring and alerting—PagerDuty, Sentry, DataDog, etc.—but the business and product side didn't have many. We built Orbiter to solve these problems.
Here's an example: at a previous company, a number of backend endpoints were migrated which unknowingly caused a connected product feature in the Android shopping flow to disappear. Typically, users in that part of the shopping flow progress to the next page at a 70% rate but because of the missing feature, this rate dropped by 5% absolute. This was a serious issue but was hard to catch by looking at dashboards alone because: 1) this was just one number changing out of hundreds of metrics that change every hour, 2) this number naturally fluctuates daily and weekly, especially as the business grows, 3) it would have taken hours of historical data analysis to ascertain that a 5% drop was highly abnormal for that day. It wasn't until this metric stayed depressed for many days that someone found it suspicious enough to investigate. All in, including the time to implement and deploy the fix, conversion was depressed for seven days costing more than $50K in reduced sales.
It can be especially challenging for the human eye to judge the severity of a changing metric; seasonality, macro trends, and sensitivity all play a role in equivocating conclusions. To solve this, we build machine learning models for your metrics that capture the normal/abnormal patterns in the data. We use a supervised learning approach for our alerting algorithm to identify real abnormalities. Then, we forecast the expected "normal" metric value and also classify whether an abnormality should be labeled as an alert. Specifically, forecasting models identify macro-trends and seasonality patterns (e.g. this particular metric is over-indexed on Mondays and Tuesdays relative to other days of the week). Classifier models determine the likelihood of true positives based on historical patterns. Each metric has an individual sensitivity threshold that we tune with our customers so the alerting conditions catch real issues without being overly noisy. Models are re-trained weekly and we take user feedback on alerts to update the model and improve accuracy over time.
Some of our customers are startups with sparse data. In these cases, it can be challenging to build a high-confidence model. What we do instead is work with our customers to define manual settings for "guardrails" that trigger alerts. For example, "Alert me if this metric falls below 70%!" or "Alert me if this metric drops more than 5% week over week". As our customers grow and their datasets grow, we can apply greater intelligence to their monitoring by moving over to the automated modeling approach.
We made Orbiter so that it's easy for non-technical teams to set-up and use. It's a web app, requires no eng development, and connects to existing analytics databases the same way that existing dashboard tools like Looker or a SQL editor just plug in. Teams connect their Slack to Orbiter so they get immediate notifications when a metric changes abnormally.
We anticipate that the HN community has members, teammates, or friends who are product managers, businesspeople, or data scientists that might have the problems we experienced. We'd love for you and them to give Orbiter a spin. Most importantly, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please let us know in the thread, and/or feel free to send us a note at firstname.lastname@example.com. Thank you! <comment><USER2> I work on power stations which normally have about 1000 monitored variables per turbine-generator and another 500 for the plant in general. So typically 2500 for a two unit plant.

Alarms are generated if a variable exceeds a threshold, or a binary variable is in the wrong state.

Is Orbiter something that would benefit power plants?

<comment><USER3> I think some sort of anomaly detection would be useful in your case. There are a bunch of libraries floating about, I remember at least Netflix[1], Yelp and Datadog talking about them. There appears to be a really good links page available too[1]. You can also learn a lot from _Forecasting Principles and Practice_ , which is free online[2]

I have previously pitched using a kind of SPC-for-metrics approach, with Nelson rules[3] to help surface metrics which are starting to move out of control. I think it would have the advantage over ML techniques that it's easy to understand.

My experience is that alerting thresholds are a very poor mechanism for managing systems. They just ossify past disasters and typically become noise. Alert fatigue renders them meaningless. If they're set by the manufacturer then the incentives are broken, they will favour false alerts in order to push legal responsibility onto the operator.

[0] [https://github.com/Netflix/Surus](https://github.com/Netflix/Surus)

[1] [https://github.com/yzhao062/anomaly-detection- resources](https://github.com/yzhao062/anomaly-detection-resources)

[2] [https://otexts.com/fpp2/](https://otexts.com/fpp2/)

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

<comment><USER2> thanks for the links.

We only create an alert if there is a problem the operator can solve, otherwise there is no point in waking them up at 3 AM, so if anything our thresholds are set as loose as possible instead of as tight as possible.

However there are many instances where the operator could be alerted earlier that the machine operation is abnormal. For example the stator windings are rated for operation up to 155 degrees C but the machine is lightly loaded for a long time, the ambient temperature is normal, and the windings are 140 degrees. No alert would be generated from the stator winding temperature but something is amiss.

I think this is the case where some ML/AI/hypeword techniques might be applicable, for the controller to know that based on half a dozen variables the expected value for other variables based on past operation.

<comment><USER4> You should take a look at [http://riemann.io](http://riemann.io)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really excited about this.

We're very early into doing a PoC where we use DataDog/Cloudwatch for our business metrics for this specific use case. We're also looking at tracking data quality metrics. The standard BI reporting tools are very immature when it comes to alerting based on changes in data over time.

I hope at some point you consider ingesting metrics like the ops tools do. Giving you direct access to my database is going to be really challenging but I'm glad to send you what I want you to keep track of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah very interesting, and agree on the immaturity of alerting/time-series changes for current BI reporting tools. Would be great if you could send me more info about what you're thinking about tracking & also hear more about how the PoC you guys are thinking of. Would you mind sending me a note to winston[at]getorbiter.com?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is interesting. If you can deliver on this, I'm guessing you can deliver on a lot more. Figuring out what warrants an alert is a non-trivial problem, and it's in the same problem space as answering other business questions like "what is our true organic traffic".

Also, on metric drops I'm interested not just in the alerts but also in the narrowing down of what is causing the drop. For example, the first question we always ask is "could marketing blend be causing this". I imagine your ML can figure that out. You could also point out where to look, like "iOS 13 is fine, but there is a severe drop in conversion for iOS 12" or "Conversion dropped for app version 13.2 on Android".

Great stuff! I'd love to see if it works!

<comment><USER7> Funny, Actually I know a startup in Edinburgh that has figured out the "true organic traffic" and they've used ML to fix the data for marketing attribution model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Was this ML attribution model output explainable / deterministic? I've seen some really complicated marketing attribution models in the past and hear it was something of a never-ending battle to understand and arrive at the "right" model.

<comment><USER7> I believe it is explainable as I didn't hear anything fancy about the model being built. It's been tested and proven to cut marketing spend quite a bit while delivering the same results. A patent has also been filed.

You are spot on that sometimes we just overcomplicate models and sometimes it's best to go with something explainable and deterministic but less accurate as opposed to more accuracy but complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congrats on the launch. This is a really interesting space that I think has a ton of potential - I'm watching pretty closely to see what comes out of it.

Have you heard of Outlier ([https://outlier.ai](https://outlier.ai))? Do you have any thoughts? How does Orbiter compare to Outlier?

(I haven't used Outlier but see it come up in anomaly detection discussion a lot recently).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! There's definitely a lot of growth and potential in this space and we're really excited too. We're focused on intelligent monitoring and alerting for metrics that the user cares about & defines. We also automate the diagnostic playbooks that teams use today after detecting an issue (eg check data, check user segments, check geographies, etc.) Outlier seems to focus on insights and less on monitoring/alerting. They comb through data to surface 4-5 "unexpected insights" about your customers or business every day in a FB feed-type product.

<comment><USER9> Hi! (Founder of Outlier.ai here) You are right, our platform is designed to produce the most important insights from massive amounts of data, without requiring human supervision/configuration. It is most useful in applications when there is too much data to set up guardrails, or the teams don't know what guardrails to create. Our typical customers are very large consumer businesses who have data spread across dozens of systems and need to ensure they never miss important emerging trends or problems.

We are not an alerting or monitoring system, so I don't think you'd use us for the same applications as Orbital. The typical users of Outlier are the business users ranging from executives to business operations who want to make sure they are asking the right questions about the business.

Orbital looks like a great product, good luck in building your business!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Without looking into details of your soluton, what's the difference between your solution and Cloudwatch anomaly detection? [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch_Anomaly_Detection.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Orbiter anomaly detection is for any DB (e.g. Postgres, Snowflake) and metrics that business/product teams tend to track such as transaction conversion %, user growth, add item to basket %, etc.

Amazon Cloudwatch anomaly detection is for AWS resources & apps, and covers infra metrics like resource utilization, app performance, ops health.

In terms of the anomaly detection capabilities -- both are using similar machine learning processes to detect metric issues automatically!

P.S. If you get curious about the details of our solution, we have a 2 minute video demo ;) Cheers! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7P_M6j0P2A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7P_M6j0P2A)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for replying. That's a good demo. However, I don't necessarily agree Cloudwatch is only for infra metrics. Theoretically, you could send any metrics to CW and leverage the anomaly detection feature. Given it aggregates data over time and you could lost granularities of your data, that's probably not a good idea for business centric data. Then I found AWS QuickSight ([https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/features- ml/?nc=sn&loc=2&d...](https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/features- ml/?nc=sn&loc=2&dn=2)) which seems to have a similar feature parity?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats on launching! Looks very helpful!

As a data scientist, I found that a drop in metrics was just as often due to a data pipeline issue as it was an actual business problem. This unfortunately causes business users to lose trust in the metrics quickly. How do you plan to differentiate between those two root causes of metric changes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah I can empathize with you here (as a former DS) -- we had incidents in the past that were data pipeline / instrumentation changes causing bad data which then caused metric drops (versus a real product issue, but they nonetheless caused a loss of confidence in data).

We think there are a number of diagnostic features that could be helpful here (to be built!). Teams today run playbooks to root cause issues when metric drops happen. We should be able to take that playbook and automate it. Say, Orbiter identifies an abnormal change in Metric X. The team is then probably analyzing sub-funnel metrics Y and Z, or looking at various dimension cuts to isolate the issue. Maybe they're also checking data quality by comparing the count of event volume vs. count of user IDs vs. count of device IDs, etc. If we run all of these diagnostic checks when Metric X drops, we could give the team insight into what we know is OK vs. not OK.

<comment><USER12> That's really cool! Besides identifying abrupt changes in metric X, for me the most difficult part is trying to understand what caused this change in X. Great to know that you have this issue in the roadmap, but do you think it's possible to develop a model/automation that is generic enough to be used in different business ? Maybe analysing the correlation between different time series could be a way to go ?

<comment><USER7> It's definitely possible if you have the underlying data definitions so you're not having to compare time-series across industries (it'll be hard because every single business' metrics could be so different based on the way the metrics themselves are setup).

Avora ([https://avora.com/product/](https://avora.com/product/)) and Thoughtspot ([https://Thoughtspot.com](https://Thoughtspot.com)) all have the root cause capability

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is really cool! Our search-engine-based impressions dropped substantially in early Feb. and because we didn't have that in our main dashboards, it took us almost 2 weeks to discover that. Orbiter would've been pretty useful for that - got in touch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Looking forward to getting connected. We've heard SEO-specific use cases come up with some of the other companies we've worked with too -- you basically need to find out the exact time that your SEO ranking saw a material change cause it's usually driven by something that shipped at that time. Otherwise takes a long time to get back the traffic from GOOG

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This sounds really cool! I've wished for something like this many times. I am mostly attracted by the fact that it would be mostly automatic. I am hoping it lives up to the hype.

Signed up for the beta. All the best!

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been talking with AppDynamics, and much of what you have said in this thread could have been said by AppD. Are you hoping to get some of their market?

</comment><comment><USER16> I really like the manual configurability. In our startup, we work a lot with influencers and it's very usual for us to have strong spikes in signups (and also high/ low CVR for different quality of influencers and "strength of promotion"). This nature would a purely ML model to constantly shout alert.

</comment><comment><USER17> I saw y'all on PH and immediately submitted to get early access. Super excited to try it out, and congrats on the launch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Woohoo! Thanks so much. Looking forward to getting in touch soon :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Congrats on the launch! This is definitely a real, big problem.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is what Maxly.coM used to do. They learned several valuable lessons and would be worth talking to one of the founders.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip - haven't heard of Maxly before but will do some research

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats on the launch. We're in an adjacent/overlapping space with drift detection/model monitoring so it's always very exciting to see automatic data monitoring tools come into place. We're hoping that as more and more startups come onboard the better it is for all of us. Cheers and best wishes!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! We're actually a team of Canadians too (but have been living/working in SF Bay Area) :D Always great to see more applications for data science - best of wishes to you too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Go Winston! So much better than trying to do this in Tableau</comment>