Valve: OpenGL is faster than DirectX — even on Windows - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows <comment><USER2> While Valve is certainly in a position to know this, it's worth keeping in mind that they do have a horse in this race. For other legitimate reasons, Valve wants to move away from Windows as a platform, and that requires that people be convinced of the viability of the alternatives, which in turn hinges on whether or not OpenGL is competitive with DirectX.

That doesn't mean they're wrong about OpenGL being faster than DirectX, and even if they _are_ wrong, it doesn't mean they're being intentionally misleading. But it's important to keep our eye on the priors.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that ExtremeTech is slanting their words in order to sensationalize the story.

Valve (in their blog post):

"This experience lead to the question: why does an OpenGL version of our game run faster than Direct3D on Windows 7? It appears that it's not related to multitasking overhead. We have been doing some fairly close analysis and it comes down to a few additional microseconds overhead per batch in Direct3D which does not affect OpenGL on Windows. Now that we know the hardware is capable of more performance, we will go back and figure out how to mitigate this effect under Direct3D."

Extreme Tech:

"As for why OpenGL is faster than DirectX/Direct3D, the simple answer is that OpenGL seems to have a smoother, more efficient pipeline. At 303.4 fps, OpenGL is rendering a frame every 3.29 milliseconds; at 270.6 fps, DirectX is rendering a frame in 3.69 milliseconds. That 0.4 millisecond difference is down to how fast the DirectX pipeline can process and draw 3D data."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the real interesting conclusion here is: if OpenGL has parity with Direct3D on Windows in terms of features and performance, why should anyone _ever_ use Direct3D any more? Direct3D is almost non-existent on mobiles and tablets, so anyone using Direct3D is just making their lives harder if they want to go mobile, or port to any other OS. We don't live in Windows monopoly days any more. If OpenGL can get you the same thing on Windows, _and_ helps make it easy to port to other big platforms, I can see Direct3D really falling to the sidelines.

<comment><USER5> You are right. OpenGL works everywhere.

But you have to be careful: my amateur OpenGL 3d game had problems running on half of computers, especially laptops. It's because various cards support different opengl extensions. You can't use non-power-of-two textures, can't use textures bigger than 512x512 (or other number), can't generate mipmaps automatically, can't have too big display lists.

I thought about optional DirectX renderer when running on Windows, because I've heard it's more standarized.

<comment><USER6> The non power of two issue is not a problem. Just load the texture in with padding to get it to the next power and put a texture region in that doesn't have the padding.

OpenGL is an awesome platform for those who want system portability IE minecraft, or any other indie developer who wants maximum exposure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, DirectX benefits from network effects, but there are a ton of mobile game developers these days developing for Android and iOS in OpenGL ES, and I could see a day coming when these network effects are reversed in OpenGL's favor. The fact that Valve and EA are going to support Linux and OpenGL is just a bonus, although a pretty big one. And don't forget Blizzard's Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 are also written in OpenGL for Mac OS X.

<comment><USER8> > a ton of mobile game developers these days developing for Android and iOS in > OpenGL ES, and I could see a day coming when these network effects are > reversed in OpenGL's favor.

I'm pretty sure we're seeing that already. And WebGL is not going to improve the situation for D3D.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why stop at OpenGL? Let's work with GPU vendors to get a more consistent, lower-level API for high-performance 3D graphics. John Carmack observed that not being able to program the hardware directly caused an order of magnitude drop in effective performance of PC hardware. [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/08/get-with-the- prog...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/08/get-with-the-programmer- carmack-speaks/)

<comment><USER10> Because isolation from dozens of graphics architectures (many from the same vendor) and hiding chipset bugs (not just in the graphics hardware, btw) that would scare the jebus out of you is worth it. Not having to track down wierd synchronization issues is like money in the bank to most developers.

Make every game reinvent their own chip-level drivers? Wow. You want to run 10X faster, or slip your schedule by years?

<comment><USER11> You can get the best of both worlds, with opensource drivers though.

They imply well documented hardware and the potential to access it directly. But you can also use, and/or help improve the the higher levels of abstraction.

<comment><USER12> You're talking about the really great out-of-the-box support that audio always enjoys on Linux, right?

No, let's be honest--we'd end up with a half-dozen opinionated projects with slight overlap implementing different graphical interfaces, and another half- dozen metaprojects on top of that. Fuck. That.

Just give me a competent implementation of OpenGL or Direct3D by leading vendors who know their hardware and quirks, and be done with it.

<comment><USER11> Audio support accross the board is actually better, than the graphics support.

What is changing now, is that because of the consolification of commercial OSes, there is strong commercial pressure to support linux now, just to keep an open OS. What is happening with opengl on linux now, is because of this change.

So, audio isnt a good counter example: who knows how much worse it would have been with closed source drivers.

And the problem isnt having multiple solutions/systems available: the problem is lack of a clear winner.

Companies like Valve and Canonical will be getting more dominant in picking the "winning" systems. This is true already to such an extend, companies like NVidia and AMD go out of there way to please companies like Valve. Contrast this with the kind of get-on-our-knees-and-beg relationships the linux community has had.

And Valve is arguing for opensource drivers. You should read Intels blog about their cooperation. They felt like they had to constantly remind Valve, they were preaching to the choir.

And NVidia and AMD might not give Linux much priority, but they will not let Linux ruin their relationship with the gaming industry.

The point about open drivers is continuity and integration. The HW vendors really should concern themselves with the quality. The opensource community should concern itself with adapting that support to their needs.

I want NVidia to write and maintain their driver, but i want them to publish the source. They are ones that should maintain quality: they are the ones profitting from it with hardware sales.

Audio is a really bad example, because the actual hardware is pretty much without a meaningfull profit margin, being integrated and all. And at the other side, there are few needs that reach beyond just "play this audiobuffer". I dont know who writes these systems, or what motivates them. But 99% of the needs were already fullfilled with OSS.

Thats very different from game developpers contributing to the graphics infrastructure, to fix actual problems they have.

<comment><USER12> " _Thats very different from game developpers contributing to the graphics infrastructure, to fix actual problems they have._ "

I think you grossly overestimate the time most developers have to fix other peoples' problems, especially game developers.

In fact, I'll go out further: if you give game developers the impression that they can go look at driver code, you are opening an entire box of sadness and compulsive brittle micro-optimization that will consume a lot of man hours.

It doesn't matter about the power trip Linux people can have now that the graphics vendors are coming to them. It doesn't matter about the "freedom" to have overworked and underpaid developers muck around in driver code that frankly may exceed what they are competent at doing. It doesn't even matter that the open-source community can now second-guess and snarf about shitty vendor driver code.

What matters is that this innocent little idea could do very, very bad things to developers. "It Just Works, don't worry" is a solid reassurance, and having my game fail because some neckbearded jackass decides to recompile the Nvidia sources but-oh-so-different and push it upstream is unacceptable.

This is a bad idea.

And, for chrissakes, let's start small. How about you give me a stable ABI to program against, and we'll take it from there? Baby steps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My impression is that part of the issue is that OpenGL has only really gotten its act together, so to speak, recently and that fresh in the memory of many game devs was a time when DirectX really was obviously better.

</comment><comment><USER9> This article completely missed the fact that there's way more to DirectX than just Direct3D. DirectInput, DirectPlay, DirectSound etc. are out-of-scope for OpenGL which means you have to add a _lot_ of unrelated libraries to approach the same functionality as DirectX.

<comment><USER14> That's not really so much of a problem as you might think:

<http://www.libsdl.org/>

<comment><USER15> The lead developer of SDL is now working at Valve, so I guess that is a very likely solution.

<comment><USER16> Do you mean Ryan Gordon?

<comment><USER15> No, Sam Lantinga. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Lantinga>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sorry but Valve has been on a smear campaign to slow Windows 8 adoption for one reason, Microsoft will own the store and the keys. So I'm immediately skeptical of any information they put out there. A lot of their grumpy comments sound very similar to Sierra Games of the 80s and 90s that resisted the jump to Windows from DOS.

I do think this push into Linux is great for making Linux a richer platform overall. This way, everyone wins in that case, but I still do not see it an overly successful monetary venture.

If Windows 8 is a failure, people will either stay with what they know (Windows 7/XP) or continue to defect to OS X. Microsoft doing what they always do, will see where they need to improve, and continue to iterate and push out a more polished Windows 9.

<comment><USER18> OpenGL is still available through Windows. It's hard to see this as a "smear campaign" on anything but the Direct3D batch processing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Is it time for an OpenGL revolution?_

Perhaps not, lets wait until Valve has a chance to fix their D3D issues. It seems to me the blog post was more about success in ferreting out problems with drivers and APIs on Linux and Windows than pure Linux/OpenGL superiority.

I'm a longtime Linux user and there is little reason to assume Linux the is king of graphics. One thing worth pointing out is that Valve is using a Nvidia card with proprietary drivers which don't make use of any shared Linux graphics infrastructure (Gallium3D, etc). So this type of performance gain compared to Windows may not be repeatable with Intel or ATI cards.

<comment><USER20> Valve has been optimizing Source on Direct3D/Windows for 10 years, so I don't think waiting any longer will help.

<comment><USER9> Valve's own blog seems to think it will: "Now that we know the hardware is capable of more performance, we will go back and figure out how to mitigate this effect under Direct3D." <http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster- zombies/>

<comment><USER21> notice he said mitigate, not eliminate. There's a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What, only weeks after I threw away my (very) old OpenGL books? The reason why DirectX is used everywhere is that graphics cards have been developed to suit it better for the past 10 years or so, I thought. Also, DirectX is a more complete solution for developers including networking, audio, controller handling code ...

<comment><USER23> OpenGL ES 2.0 is actually pretty clean; the monstrosity that is other OpenGL is basically being held up by the CAD companies (such as AutoDesk) who are very conservative and don't care much about games; they just want their old code to keep running on new versions of the spec.

<comment><USER24> This simply isn't true. A number of years ago with the introduction of DirectX 10, Autodesk began transitioning several mainstay products to exclusive DirectX use under Windows (see [http://archicad- talk.graphisoft.com/files/autodesk_inventor_...](http://archicad- talk.graphisoft.com/files/autodesk_inventor_opengl_to_directx_evolution_788.pdf)) Morevoer, Autodesk has moved to using a modern, unified renderer for a large number of their products. There may be other CAD companies "holding up" the "monstrosity" of dated OpenGL versions, but Autodesk is not that company. In all likelihood, the issues lies not with the CAD companies, but with their clients that refuse to upgrade their legacy applications of 10-15+ years age.

<comment><USER23> Ok so my information must be outdated, apologies, I read about this a few years ago.

OGL still needs to get rid of the legacy fixed unit pipeline and standardizes the interfaces for more advanced functionality (like OGL ES 2 and DX10).

<comment><USER25> Ever heard of the Core Profile?

If you request an OpenGL context from your OS and ask for a core profile context, you'll get a context that's almost identical to ES2. It's shader based and all of the legacy fixed stuff is entirely gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Yes, yes it is. Now can OpenGL please get their act together and create a respectable SDK and documentation?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm slightly skeptical of their benchmarks -- the fact they're using 300fps numbers is a red flag. No one runs games at that speed. What's the comparison for a game running at 30 - 60fps? My hunch is that D3D has a tiny fixed per- frame cost that becomes irrelevant when frames take 10x longer to render.

<comment><USER28> when you turn on vsync, the frame rate is at most 60. When you turn it off, you certainly can have 300fps.

<comment><USER27> Sorry, my point was that they picked a benchmark that was too easy. I suspect if the machine was straining to hit 60fps their results could be vastly different. That's how most games run, so that'd be more interesting to see.

<comment><USER29> I think the point is that benchmarking the graphics subsystem's throughput is easiest when you look at high framerate games; otherwise CPU or just rendering time might be the dominating factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "More developers use DirectX because it has a cleaner API and better documentation."

Sounds about right. If raw speed was more essential than less problematic development, we'd all be writing in assembler.

</comment><comment><USER31> DirectX is a very good option for games. OpenGL on the other hand is a more generic 3D API (used, for example, by most CAD and other scientific applications). Additionally, of course, it is available on all platforms. I doubt that DirectX will outlive OpenGL in the long run.

<comment><USER32> > DirectX is a very good option for games. OpenGL on the other hand is a more > generic 3D API

I don't know about that any more. I have heard that for about a decade, but with the massive changes that have been made to OpenGL, I don't see why that should still be true, if it even was true in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Here is another, older take from Wolfire Games (Overgrowth, Lugaru):

[http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL- an...](http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not- DirectX)

and a follow up:

<http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/DirectX-vs-OpenGL-revisited>

</comment><comment><USER34> This puzzles me. Last I heard, the Mac versions of Valve's games were slower than their Windows counterparts. So maybe it's more about the Linux kernel than about OpenGL? Is there any comparison between the three platforms on the same hardware?

<comment><USER8> > This puzzles me. Last I heard, the Mac versions of Valve's games were slower > than their Windows counterparts.

That's in part a driver issue (though Mach message traffic may also limit perfs), the drivers are mostly developed in-house by Apple, and Apple is notoriously hard to work with (for third parties). So while Valve did lead to significant performance improvements following Steam/OSX I would expect they couldn't work closely with internal drivers developers.

And game perfs probably _still_ isn't the main focus for OSX drivers development, sadly.

<comment><USER35> _the drivers are mostly developed in-house by Apple_

Really? Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure that while there's some Apple-supplied kernel-mode glue, and maybe a lot of user-space components, most of the driver code is actually supplied by NVidia/AMD/Intel.

In fact at one time or another OSX seems to have inherited funny GPU driver bugs that were common with Windows (like the way NVidia's 32-bit drivers were unhappy with living outside the 2GB-4GB memory range).

<comment><USER8> No, you're right, what I wrote was idiotic, they clearly are not going to develop the driver code from scratch especially when there's hardware bugs to fix in the drivers. I tried to mean that nobody else built/touched/integrated the drivers, that Apple had pretty complete control over the binary and what did and did not go in it (and likely what kind of code they'd integrate), related to that were things like their long-outdated OpenGL support (2.1 mainline until Lion, which bumped support to... 3.2 — by the Lion release, OpenGL 4.1 was a year old and 4.2 would be released a month later, 3.2 was 2 years old)

Although these days I'm it looks like they write significant portions of the graphic driver subsystems: when released their automatic graphics switching seemed quite markedly different from Optimus and completely independent[0], which is corroborated by them not wanting to restrict their ability to switch back to AMD.

[0] [http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/04/inside-apples- automatic...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/04/inside-apples-automatic- gpu-switching/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> _That 0.4 millisecond difference is down to how fast the DirectX pipeline can process and draw 3D data._

So let me see if I can follow this: OpenGL is faster than DirectX because...OpenGL is faster than DirectX?

<comment><USER37> OpenGL is faster than DirectX because the pipeline is shorter/faster/more efficient/etc. i.e. it's not due to texture copying, worse memory addressing, driver issues, programmer error, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The post title bears little relation to the linked article's title.

<comment><USER20> True, but it better represents the linked article's body IMO.

<comment><USER20> And of course the mods have gone and messed things up again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I coulda told everybody that.</comment>


Ruby on Rails controller based JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/s12chung/jcontroller

<comment><USER2> Without having inspected the repo too much I ask myself.. (well, not just myself).. how is this different from requiring an external .js in your view except for a different, nice stylistic choice?

<comment><AUTHOR> I try to make it clean having different JS for each individual HTML response. Plus, JSON parameters.

The alternative is usually having script tags with written JS inside, which is ugly.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Machine Learning, but in COBOL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/victorqribeiro/perceptronCobol <comment><AUTHOR> I decided to take a shot at COBOL and wrote a simple machine learning algorithm (Perceptron, a single neuron neural network). I had a lot of fun doing it and I hope you like it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hahah, very clever! Now go try to run you own mainframe [http://hercules-390.eu](http://hercules-390.eu)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, I'm working with someone who came from mainframe. I'll show him this.</comment></comment>


U.S. energy grid hacked 79 times this year - <AUTHOR> http://www.4029tv.com/money/hackers-attacked-the-us-energy-grid-79-times-this-year/29792446#ixzz3JTXgXqXT <comment><USER2> > taking out a city's power would take a calculated, coordinated effort by an > army of hackers

Good thing none of our adversaries have any form of co-ordination or literal armies of hackers.</comment>


Twitter's new R package for anomaly detection - <AUTHOR> http://www.r-bloggers.com/twitters-new-r-package-for-anomaly-detection/

<comment><USER2> This is blogspam and a duplicate. The original url is here:

[https://blog.twitter.com/2015/introducing-practical-and- robu...](https://blog.twitter.com/2015/introducing-practical-and-robust- anomaly-detection-in-a-time-series)

And the previous discussion is here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8846205](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8846205)

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't call it blogspam since r-bloggers.com is an opt-in aggregator. But yes a link to the original makes more sense.

<comment><USER4> What's the point to credit middle man? Hacker news, reddit do the same (or even better), r-bloggers just rip off the content. Been there, done that.

<comment><USER3> That's not what I said, my point was that labelling it blogspam doesn't seem correct because it's opt-in and a preferred source for articles for many in the R community. And as I said the original link should have been linked to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me how much of a hole there is in my knowledge about statistics and such. I built myself a Twitter client that sucks users' geolocations into a DB so I can do all kinds of analyses on their movements. Makes me wish we had Statistics classes back in school. That should come right after learning the ABC.

<comment><USER6> Even the original twitter blog seems to have gone out of its way to make this seem more complex then it is...

Decomposition of time series is done with STL (stl function in stats package) and this is the first part of what they call "Seasonal Hybrid ESD (S-H-ESD)" (sounds impressive right?) which then apparently just involves taking the max absolute difference from the detrended sample mean in terms of standard deviations, remove it and repeat until you have your collection of x outliers. If they wanted to this could be explained in a few sentences, and the underlying code is really simple [0], but for whatever reason it's been written up as advanced analytics — as if decomposing a time series is a major challenge.

[0] [https://github.com/twitter/AnomalyDetection/blob/master/R/de...](https://github.com/twitter/AnomalyDetection/blob/master/R/detect_anoms.R)

<comment><USER7> While the computation might be relatively simple, its still necessary to be aware of literature and use the proper academic description for the methods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting that they chose to write their anomaly detection code in R, which is typically used in offline, post hoc analysis mode. It seems reasonable to suppose that the ability to discover an anomaly like "service X is failing" in real time is more valuable then discovering it a week later.

In order to monitor important time series with this code, they would presumably need to run it every n minutes on the entire time series, or at least the recent part of it. Seems an anomaly detection system operating on streaming data might make more sense.

Perhaps their real time anomaly detection system uses simpler logic on streaming data?

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if these R packages (AnomalyDetection, BreakoutDetection) are to be used on large scale data or they more intended to be used in lab work?

<comment><USER7> Doesn't look like they are setup to run in parallel, but most R stuff isn't. Unless a package has explicit integration with one of the distributed libraries such as doParallel

Would be interesting to see this package hooked up to streaming data and monitor performance

<comment><USER10> I was wondering if the algorithm could be added to Etsy' Skyline, which does anomaly detection on streaming data, based on a basket of algorithms (see [https://github.com/etsy/skyline/blob/master/src/analyzer/alg...](https://github.com/etsy/skyline/blob/master/src/analyzer/algorithms.py)). Our own data is periodically bursty, and because Skyline doesn't apply STL like this code, we have data that looks anomalous all the time.</comment></comment></comment>


Terrorism is not Effective - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective

<comment><USER2> I'll hazard a guess that the author ends up on a list of people that need to have extra NSA monitoring. :-)

Quite a fascinating read. Luckily the terrorists don't seem to think like he does.

<comment><USER3> The author argues in a separate article that terrorism is not about terror: [http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror](http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror)</comment></comment>


Backslide: CLI for Creating Self-Contained HTML Presentations using Markdown - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sinedied/backslide <comment><USER2> .pdf creation is a nice little bonus, thanks to decktape.</comment>


The full PandoMonthly interview with Dropbox's Drew Houston - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/02/22/the-full-pandomonthly-interview-with-dropboxs-drew-houston/ <comment><USER2> I'm watching this right now in a second window.

It's got to be the most boring PandoMonthly ever...</comment>


Why YKK? The Japanese company behind the world's best zippers - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/branded/2012/04/ykk_zippers_why_so_many_designers_use_them_.html <comment><USER2> "YKK isn't the kind of brand that markets to consumers. (Or seeks any kind of publicity: They declined to speak to me for this story.) You don't buy your jeans and jackets by looking for their letters on that pull. Likewise, you almost certainly wouldn't nix a garment purchase because the zipper isn't YKK."

I guess I'm an exception here. If I want to wear a garment more than a few times I always check to make sure the zippers are YKK. If they skimped on the zippers, who knows what else they skimped on.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately the skimpers are one step ahead of you: "Counterfeit YKK zippers are flooding the world market and undermining consumer confidence in your products." [1]

[1] [http://www.ykk-usa.com/menu/faq/counterfeit1.html](http://www.ykk- usa.com/menu/faq/counterfeit1.html)

<comment><USER4> It's their own fault. According to Wikipedia, "YKK has manufacturing facilities in 71 countries". If you spread you know-how all over the world in search of better margins, of course that creates copycat spin offs based on the same people and equipment.

Anyway, it could be just a lie. Any time a genuine overseas YKK factory puts out crap, they could just dump it on the market with the YKK boss' approval. Then spin a story about how it is counterfeit so as to try to protect the brand.

Maybe the only good YKK zipper is one that is actually made in Japan using the mythical 100 year old zipper-making machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The EU's General Court backed the European Commission's fines of 150 million euros ($187 million) for YKK, based in Tokyo, and 110 million euros for Coats in 2007 over cartels involving fasteners and related machinery, one of which ran for more than 21 years. The EU said at the time that the zipper market was worth about 400 million euros a year and the market for other metal fasteners was worth 200 million euros."

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-27/coats-and-ykk- lose-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-27/coats-and-ykk-lose-eu- court-challenges-over-antitrust-fines.html)

<comment><USER6> So these companies led the cartels? I get that there was a judgement, but it's REALLY light on details.

<comment><USER7> [http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/09/19/idUSL1926941520070...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/09/19/idUSL1926941520070919)

> The Commission has found four separate infringements in which these > companies agreed on coordinated price increases, fixed minimum prices, > allocated customers, shared markets and exchanged other commercially > important and confidential information

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I lived in China for a while and had the occasion to experience the constant frustration that accompanies Chinese zippers. Zipping down your fly and not knowing whether you will be able to zip up. Taking 5 minutes every morning to zip up your kid's raincoat. And my favorite, having a "Golden Harvest" backpack zipper fail while on the bus and spilling its contents on the floor. Ever since then, I always make sure the zippers on my clothes are YKK.

<comment><USER9> Uniqlo uses YKK zippers and I can honestly say that they are the best zippers ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've bought plenty of bags, outdoor clothing, etc. which specifically advertise "YKK zippers" as a feature, similar to Gore-Tex, Vibram, or Thinsulate, so I suspect at least among "technical" consumers, YKK does have enough brand recognition and following.

</comment><comment><USER11> I suspect many people who've ever idly looked at a zip will have noticed the letters "YKK" on them, and at least a few of those people will have made it to YKK's Wikipedia page, which is at least equally as informative as this article.

I was a bit confounded by this sentence: "The precision necessary to craft a working bicycle chain or a smoothly meshing zipper was simply beyond us for all those prior millennia." Surely the author means to write "The precision necessary to craft ... on a massive scale"; of course we've been able to build things requiring comparable or greater precision for centuries, but to build the machines necessary to mass-produce them is a relatively recent innovation. Or perhaps he was just joking.

<comment><USER12> Roller bearings are old, but no one ever made a ball bearing until the bicycle era. They grew up together, and the first ball bearing equipped bicycles dominated competition about a century ago. Ball bearings were the carbon fiber of their era.

I don't think ball mfgr technology of a level of roundness and surface quality suitable for ball bearings was compatible with ancient technology. The metalurgy would be highly questionable but that aspect would be possible.

You are partially correct that roller chain could have been built by ancient craftsmen if they had the idea, but the invention credit is about a century ago. The metalurgy would have been questionable, the ancients would have ended up with chain links the size of your fist, which would have screwed up weight and power transmission making a v-belt a lot more likely. I'm surprised bicycles don't try v-belts.

<comment><USER13> Here you go:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt- driven_bicycle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt-driven_bicycle)

<comment><USER12> Well, those look like kilodollar+ custom jobs. I guess I was thinking more stereotypical department store bike from China, where the mechanics aren't generally much of a priority so introducing something isn't very dangerous.

You can either shove innovation in at the top where R+D fits in the budget, or at the bottom where reliability is never assumed anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This just seems like a blatant submarine article [1] - anyone who upvoted want to share what they found interesting about it?

      [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

<comment><USER15> I haven't upvoted but found it mildly interesting. Point that I found interesting were mostly:

* one company dominates the market for zippers by essentially capturing the middle ground of "good product with a wide range of options, reasonably priced and flawless execution"

* the example of a company dominating the market with what seems to counter the trend of outsourcing, producing everything in house, which means keeping the knowledge in and full control over the quality. A bit like Apple in that regard.

It's more like a lightweight snack for my brain than a full meal, useless but interesting knowlege, but I also read Now I Know. May or may not be a submarine, but made me check the zippers on my hoodie (YKK :)

<comment><USER16> Yeah. I found it neat that this company dominates the industry by making a _quality product_ , not by acquiring and enforcing a centuries-long monopoly on an idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17>
      Yoshida also preached a management principle he termed "The
      Cycle of Goodness." It holds that "no one prospers unless
      he renders benefit to others."

I particularly liked that line. That is how things ought to be but not sure that is how it plays out. For example I am quite skeptical whether removing arbitrage opportunities over a timescale of milisecond really benefits anybody.

<comment><USER18> There are other practices that surely come into play as well—you don't achieve quality simply by this "cycle of goodness."

The Japanese after WWII took Deming's quality concepts—specifically that quality is the product of management, knowledge, statistics, and systems—and ran with them, embracing them more than any other society. This turned Japan from a cheap-goods manufacturer, into a country nearly fully respected for quality production, in a matter of a decade.

Want to produce quality like YKK does? It's no big mystery, it's not special, and it's not a miracle. Learn about Deming, follow his systems of management and teaching, and it will start to become clear. This applies to any company producing anything.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article is okay, however it says the no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, I thought the phrase was IBM?

<comment><USER20> I guess someone did eventually get fired for buying IBM.

<comment><USER19> Haha! Finally!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When I was 7 or 8 and lived in the Soviet Union, I remember my cousin telling me that his jacket was better than mine because it had YKK zippers.

</comment><comment><USER22> "The zipper is one of those inventions—along with the bicycle—that seems as though it should have occurred much earlier in history. How complicated could it be to assemble two wheels, two pedals, and a chain? Or to align two jagged strips of metal teeth and shuffle them together?"

Only to someone ignorant of history. They both required cheap, mass-produced steel and machines to mass produce identical products out of that steel. The advantages of the industrial revolution. To make them earlier would have been ridiculously expensive.

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's the link to the 1998 LA Times article mentioned in the story:

[http://articles.latimes.com/1998/sep/05/news/mn-19744/2](http://articles.latimes.com/1998/sep/05/news/mn-19744/2)

</comment><comment><USER24> So who makes zippers that are better than YKK? There must be smaller manufacturers with higher prices and higher quality.

<comment><USER25> riri - an Italian firm - makes very high quality zippers. I prefer them to YKK.

Aside: if you're looking for _really good_ buttons, try this company: [http://www.corozobuttons.com/](http://www.corozobuttons.com/) (Made exclusively with tagua nut, also known as 'vegetable ivory'. Very tough, plastic-like, and you get to support the Ecuadorian economy!)

<comment><USER26> Because they aren't molded, Ralph Lauren laser engraves their corozo buttons.

[http://imgur.com/gallery/1oeAPXb](http://imgur.com/gallery/1oeAPXb)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My cousin is a fashion designer and her company have had to deal with Chinese garment manufacturers who are paid to use YKK zippers and instead use counterfeit YKK. That was a few years ago though, now with fast fashion trends and cut-rate prices everywhere, they have had to give up on YKK zippers altogether.

</comment><comment><USER28> Very cool that they've brought so much in-house. I'm not quite sure why I like companies that do that, but I do. I guess it speaks to a certain seriousness about the product beyond just making money off of it, or something. And there is something oddly satisfying about a good zipper.

</comment><comment><USER29> Does anyone else think of the 'millenium bug' when they see these zippers?

<comment><USER30> I didn't, until you brought it up...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I always joke that I would love to own this brand. They are the only brand I ever saw (I know there are probably others...). I never got a Jeans without one of those.

It's like a world monopoly.

Very interesting to a bit learn more about it.

</comment><comment><USER32> I really wish I understood all the fuss about YKK zippers. I first heard the word on the street about YKK being amazing many years ago, perhaps 20 years ago, in a similar article.

Then I see plenty of support for this, but my own personal experiences are that YKK are average to middling at best.

YKK may have once been the best, but this is certainly no longer true.

All I can assume is that this is the most successful astroturfing marketing I've ever witnessed.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing)

<comment><USER33> So what's a better zipper and on what clothing brands can I find them on?

<comment><USER34> Riri, Swiss brand. E.g Aquazips on some Patagonia shells.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> After witnessing a half-dozen zippers fail on my partner's hoodie collection, none of which were YKK, it is gratifying to see this article.

The Chinese garment industry has gotten really good over the past decade, but fasteners is still where they fall down, in my experience. If I buy a jacket made in China I can expect the tailoring to be perfect, right down to lining up patterns at the seams, but the zippers are crap and buttons inevitably fall off. It is very frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER26> Here's a thought, I don't think YKK would have lasted as a publicly traded company in the US.

Pressure for profit growth from Wall St would have forced them to make cheaper buttons, until their brand name was destroyed and the company had no value.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've started buying zipper-less equipment. It's less prone to error, and feels a bit more rustic. Definitely more fun to use.

Examples: I only buy jeans with buttons. My Fjallraven backpack has metal hooks instead of a zipper.

<comment><USER37> Anecdotally, switching to a button-fly rather than zipper led to a dramatic decrease in me walking about with my fly open.

<comment><USER38> "feels a bit more rustic."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> YKK tries to have a public image. They have their own anime, "Fastening Days".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UhQ0QK8bGY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UhQ0QK8bGY)

</comment><comment><USER40> I won't buy a backpack that doesn't have YKK zippers.

</comment><comment><USER41> YKK gets a shoutout on So Fresh, So Clean by Outkast.</comment>


The Last Supper: 16 Billion Pixels (172181 x 93611) - <AUTHOR> http://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/cenacolo/look.asp

<comment><AUTHOR> Note there is music at the link. (I have no idea why).

The group singing is the Swingle Singers, if anyone is curious.</comment>


Google-backed groups criticize Apple's new warnings on user tracking - <AUTHOR> https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-google-apple/google-backed-groups-criticize-apples-new-warnings-on-user-tracking-idUKKBN2440VG <comment><USER2> > _Apple last week disclosed features in its forthcoming operating system for > iPhones and iPads that will require apps to show a pop-up screen before they > enable a form of tracking commonly needed to show personalized ads._

Christ almighty I don't think I can take more pop-ups.

They're just cancer. Cookies, newsletters, forced logins, individual folder permissions... how many bullshit popups do I have to deal with per day? It's just popup _fatigue_.

Pretty much the _only_ popups I _ever_ want to deal with are when apps need access to my private hardware (webcam etc.) or info (location, photos, contacts, etc.). You know, the actually important ones.

Things like cookies, tracking, etc. should be a browser- or OS-wide setting. Asking me individually for _every_ site, for _every_ app, is the absolute _worst user experience ever_. Sorry but this pattern just has to DIE.

My only hope is that the more that popups proliferate, the likelier there will be legislation against them, requiring system-wide settings instead. Kind of like legislation against unsolicited robocalls.

<comment><USER3> >Things like cookies, tracking, etc. should be a browser- or OS-wide setting. Asking me individually for every site, for every app, is the absolute worst user experience ever. Sorry but this pattern just has to DIE.

We already have that, the Do Not Track header. Advertising companies ignore it because they're not legally obliged to honor it. Reminder that these companies do not care about you or your user experience and will do anything they can to skirt the law to make an extra buck off you. And we can't rely on the competence of legislators because their answer is always more popups.

However, you do have weapons to defend yourself. My favorite is uMatrix. You can set it up to automatically block cookies from any site you don't have whitelisted. And you can make it only accept first party cookies. You can also have it block javascript, cross origin requests, frames by default. If a site doesn't work without scripts, you can easily enable them temporarily.

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

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/umatrix/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/umatrix/)

<comment> just-ok > _Advertising companies ignore it because they 're not legally obliged to > honor it._

Ironically enough, they don't ignore it. They instead just use it as another bit of entropy to differentiate you from everyone else who doesn't include the DNT header.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see a resurgence in marketing similar to Mad Men: where firms don't have access to highly personalized data, and eventually, will actually have to be creative, instead of just using algorithms parameterized with user tracking/profile data

<comment><USER5> i can't imagine how somebody could see the creative process in Mad Men and think that's something to be emulated. It's a bunch of privileged rich people (ad execs) coming up with ideas that they think are clever, and the only criteria for whether or not those ideas are good is if other privileged rich people (client company execs) agree.

There's no objective measures of success, just a bunch of people patting each other on the back because they all see the world the same way.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure there is an "objective measure of success" in the most plainly obvious way possible -- sales. Versus the bullshitty stats like impressions or accidental click-throughs that dominate online advertising.

<comment><USER5> If you're only running one campaign in one channel, and your product hasn't improved, and the competition's product and marketing hasn't changed, and there are no external events that will trigger a change in demand, then i suppose you could take sales as a measure of success.

<comment><USER7> The only true metric that motivates marketing companies is ad sales. As another commenter mentions, the creative department in Mad Men existed mostly to help sell ads rather than the the products in the ads. I think advertising metrics and targeting serve a similar role today.

<comment><USER8> Marketing departments want metrics that justify ad budgets and thus the Marketing department's budget. Ad metrics that show ads are ineffective, while valuable to the business, run counter to the Marketing department's incentives, and are thus suppressed.

In a rational company, ad attribution, or aggregate-level analysis using techniques like Vector Autoregression (VAR) should be owned by the CFO to avoid that conflict of interest, as shown in this article:

[https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble- is-h...](https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its- called-online-advertising)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the > limited ability to customize it still carries "a high risk of user refusal."

Good. Sounds like the warning will work.

<comment><USER10> My thoughts exactly: refusal is the whole point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook Inc > (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google, faulted Apple for not adhering > to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy > rules. Apps will now need to ask for permission twice, increasing the risk > users will refuse, the associations argued.

I was taken aback when I read that sixteen(!) agencies had banded together, including collusion from Google and Facebook.

This starkly reminded me of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (book I chapter X):

> People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and > diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or > in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible, indeed, to prevent > such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be > consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people > of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing > to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary. > > A > regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to > enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such > assemblies. It connects individuals who might never otherwise be known to > one another, and gives every man of the trade a direction where to find > every other man of it. > > A regulation which enables those of the same > trade to tax themselves, in order to provide for their poor, their sick, > their widows and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, > renders such assemblies necessary.

In other words, legal rules meant to restrain corporations' behavior instead often facilitate their collusion, which almost always results in a "conspiracy against the public."

Apple is a bit unique in this regard, as their current brand positioning entirely removes their incentive for collusion. But only as long as the benefits to employing a pro-privacy-and-security brand posture are greater than the benefits it might enjoy from hoovering up as much data as it's rivals in Mountain View and Menlo Park.

<comment><USER12> Do you seriously think that all business decisions are based on economic greed? Some people do have values and morality and integrity.

<comment><USER13> I do think they are on any company that is not majority-owned by someone that cares.

Morality and integrity are acceptable in large companies so long as they can bring some benefit. Otherwise they somehow always seem to find a way to justify doing even the most immorally-seeming stuff (like exploiting workers in third-world-country mines, selling weapons to dictators and so on).

What's more important: why wouldn't it be like this? Why would a top-level exec leave money on the table for moral reasons? How would they sell that to their stakeholders?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wish the Safari content blocking API allowed cookies to be blocked. I'd block cookies for 99% of sites I visit, allowing them only for the handful of sites to which I login.

I'd suggest Safari could even make cookies require getting user permission, the same way location access needs to be granted. "Allow, allow for 24 hours, deny." It could default deny except for sites to which it has a saved password which could default allow.

<comment><USER15> Safari started blocking third party cookies by default earlier this year.

[https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-24-safari-blocks-all- third-...](https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-24-safari-blocks-all-third-party- cookies-by-default.html)

Previously, you had to flip a switch in the settings.

<comment><USER14> I want to block even first-party cookies. And the third-party cookie logic prevents Fidelity's Full View from working correctly, so I have to disable it to use that feature of their site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's cool to conciously see the death of an industry and watch as marketing firms fail to migrate away from traditional ads.

You can whinge and whine, but progress stops for nobody.

It's also great to see Apple building this into iOS, definitely a highlight of WWDC, for me. I often see the location indicator come on and wonder what else I'm _not_ seeing.

<comment><USER17> There seem to be two conflicting lines of thought about the future of advertising.

1) Companies are learning that non-online advertising is not very worthwhile and so are reducing the resources allocated to, say, network TV ads. This has already happened to a large extent to print and radio advertising. This suggests that the future of online advertising is bright.

2) Companies are learning that online advertising is not very worthwhile. They are learning that clicks are a bad metric, that online ads target people poorly, and that customers dislike online ads. This suggests that the future of online advertising is dim.

I'm curious as to what people make of these two positions. Are companies just going to spend less on ads in general?

<comment><USER18> 3) Companies are learning that Ads that don't appear to be Ads, which also happen to reinforce customers' existing belief system, is a great way to lower their emotional guard and inject a positive product injection. The future of Native Advertising [1] is bright. So many examples already... [2]

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

[2] [https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/top/?sort=top&t=year](https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/top/?sort=top&t=year)

<comment><USER19> Add to that all kinds of affiliate marketing being passed off as legitimate recommendations.

This comment was sponsored by Skillshare

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I found it a bit ironic that Apple didn't require users to grant permission to its own measurement tool, "because it is engineered to not track users".

I don't know the details but I am guess it is still accesses the same numeric id and "trusting" that Apple is doing the right thing behind the scenes, i.e., only storing aggregate information is still required.

<comment><USER21> Sounds perfectly reasonable. Apple only cares about the data in aggregate. They don't need to track individual users. An advertiser, on the other hand, wants to know your age, sex, location and what you hard for breakfast.

<comment><USER20> This is an advertiser tool. It is used by app developers to track their advertising campaigns that lead to app installs.

I wouldn't be surprised if they still break down information by age, sex, and location as long as there are enough anonymous people in each group.

I would argue that this is only "perfectly reasonable" if you think anonymous aggregate logging solutions is a reasonable way to track user behavior, _or_ if you have such _trust_ in Apple to do the right thing, that you are willing to grant them an exception.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Apple engineers also said last week the company will bolster a free Apple- > made tool that uses anonymous, aggregated data to measure whether > advertising campaigns are working and that will not trigger the pop-up. > > "Because it's engineered to not track users, there's no need to request > permission to track," Brandon Van Ryswyk, an Apple privacy engineer, said in > a video session explaining the measurement tool to developers.

There it is. Unless there's a process that other companies can follow to certify that their solutions don't track users and get same treatment, then in the end it's about Apple trying to force themselves as player in the ads business.

It's well known playbook as they're similarly forcing themselves into identity business, with new logging requirements.

<comment><USER23> Are they moving into ads as the hardware business dries up for them? In my personal experience, many people don't replace their phones as often as they did, say, 10 years ago. A similar story played out earlier with laptops. There's no obvious new hardware category for Apple to pivot into so maybe software is their next play.

<comment><USER24> They tried before from 2010-2016 [1]. I do think this is their long term play — getting credit card transaction data and shutting others out.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd)

<comment><AUTHOR> They don't have any way to access credit card data unless you have an Apple credit card. Even then, I don't think Goldman Sachs share the data with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook Inc > (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google, faulted Apple for not adhering > to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy > rules.

How did this turn into "Google-backed groups"?! Where's Facebook in the title? Is there no attempt at unbiased reporting anymore?

<comment><USER26> The reporting is just fine, since it discloses both groups. The title is click-bait, but that's the reality of the news/youtube/etc. industry if you want views. It would have been equally click-baity if the title had said "Facebook-backed groups", yet equally false (and true).

There's also ad agencies not backed by Facebook or Google, but they're not in the title either.

<comment><USER25> > There's also ad agencies not backed by Facebook or Google, but they're not > in the title either.

Yes, and this is why the reporting is dishonest - it's feels like it's there to smear one company in the title instead of actually disclosing to us who the people are.

<comment><USER27> I don't think it is dishonest - it is more interesting that Google is anti- privacy, everyone already knows this about facebook. Additionally Google is nearly 2x the size of facebook so it takes precedence. You can't disclose everything in a headline so you lead with what you can.

<comment><USER28> It is very dishonest. Trying to make this into Apple vs Google creates this false reality that only movies get away with.

Nearly two times the size so we can make up a story of selected truths?

<comment><USER27> Should the headline have disclosed every single tie every person associated with each organization has? No that would be absurd - you can't disclose the nuance of a story in a headline so you disclose the most interesting thing. Nothing in the headline was false or misleading - just because the groups have other ties too doesn't mean the headline has to list every one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like a lovely feature. Who are these groups going to complain to and how on earth how are they going to frame it lol.

<comment><USER30> Given the tobacco industry fought to have warnings and packaging restrictions upon their products, I'm sure they created a whole play-book of things to try, though note that they eventually failed. Whilst applications are not going to give you cancer, you could fairly equate the analogy within the digital World and your personal details and digital persona being eroded away via cancerous applications.

Gets down to giving the consumer a fair and informed choice, so however they frame this - I'm sure it will only serve Apple well. Indeed, any EU investigations into Apple would probably see this move in good light and with the competition contrasting it in a different light, I don't think Apple could of asked for anything better to stash into any legal war chest with the EU when it comes to showing they are good guys and looking after consumers better than others - least that is how they can frame it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Foxes complain about Apple improving hen house security". As a user, Google and their advertiser puppets can go whistle.

<comment><USER32> The only caveat i'll add is Apple is providing ad software that doesn't trigger the double verification. This can be seen either as a push to force people to respect privacy(as their software does), or a push to control a larger share of the ad market (as the foxes here i'm sure believe)

<comment><USER31> It does not pass the smell test though: Apple has nothing to gain from its non-existent advertising arm, whilst advertisers have a lot to lose if random users can opt out. I have no doubt Apple's solution needs improving and will be circumvented, but I am not going to lament that better is not perfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > The group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the > limited ability to customize it still carries "a high risk of user refusal."

If you're doing something and you know users are going to refuse to let you do it if they have the choice, don't do it. Apple will give them a choice soon enough.

<comment><USER34> > Apple will give them a choice soon enough.

And hopefully one not reliant on so many dark patterns.

The OneTrust opt-outs are the worst (and don't even work! which must be against the california consumer privacy act).

On my iphone in safari: say I'm cooking dinner and go to epicurious.com. Greeted with the now-standard opt-out banner at the bottom.

1\. Click the "Do not sell my advertising"

2\. Greeted with a giant Conde Nast wall-of-text full screen modal

3\. Scroll through it (wait, we're now reading long legalise terms-of-service just to opt-out now?)

4\. In the middle of the wall of text, there's a toggle button for "Sell my Personal Information". Okay, lets forget about the 2012-era debate around UI ambiguity of toggle buttons and accept this UI dark pattern. Try to tap it.

5\. I tap it, and it doesn't do anything.

You read that right -- the Conde Nast OneTrust-powered opt-out, if you go through all the steps to find it -- doesn't even work on mobile. They're shipping a broken UI. Maybe you need to do something obscure like tap-and- hold-then-drag-in-a-tiny-hitbox-that-doesn't-trigger-horizontal-page-scrolling or something. I haven't figured it out.

I assume it's companies like OneTrust or Conde Nast that are complaining Apple's presumably-more-straightforward opt-out carries a "high risk of user refusal." Looking at how user-hostile what they're shipping now shows you what they're really fighting is giving consumers an effective choice.

<comment><USER35> This is the case all over the web. Many of these cookie/privacy modals just don't work or are deliberately engineered to be as obnoxious as possible. We need some legal test cases where this behavior is declared to be in violation of the spirit of GDPR and CCPA.

<comment><USER36> My favorite firefox addon after NoScript is " I don't care about cookies".

<comment><USER37> You could replace both with ublock origin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It is interesting. Apple is trying to position itself as more privacy friendly suggesting that the tide may be finally turning. It is difficult for me to believe that they would do it without customer demographic suggesting their user base places some value on it.

<comment><USER27> As has been said before - it is kinda hilarious to see people suggest Apple is privacy minded for marketing purposes because 5-7 years ago when they were privacy minded people said it would be a huge competitive disadvantage because users didn't care.

<comment><AUTHOR> And it would put Apple behind with AI/ML. They are behind, but they are catching up. Google has to do everything on the server. Most Android devices have slow outdated hardware so you can't do too much on the device.

<comment><USER39> > Google has to do everything on the server. Most Android devices have slow > outdated hardware so you can't do too much on the device.

The other side of the coin is that you can bring features to more people. People that do not have the money to buy the expensive iPhones, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Increase the chance of user refusal" - imagine that applied to literally any other context, such as bank accounts, credit cards, buying cars, etc. to see how ridiculous that statement is.

<comment><USER41> The difference being agency. You _intend_ to open a bank account, buy a car, etc. "you" [for the majority definition of 'you'] had no idea that you were being secretly tracked, and (clutches pearls) you might even _object_ to that.

This is lifting the stone that's been lying in the grass for the last decade or so, and watching all the creepy-crawlers scurry away out of the light, desperate to find somewhere to hide themselves again.

<comment><USER42> Yes, by now everyone knows they are being "secretly" tracked since it's been in the news for the last decade.

And yet privacy isn't a strong selling point for most people. It sounds like they have spoken and they don't give a damn about it.

<comment><USER43> I see it as the opposite... the ad industry are specifically worried here that people _are_ going to be given the choice, and they believe that the peoples' choice won't be good for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is somewhat off-topic, but I'm worried about closed ecosystems, the shift towards censorship, and the end of private ownership. Good examples of this are walled gardens that break basic web links (Twitter for example), or DRM- encumbered digital books.

If I buy a physical book I can lend it to someone, or sell it if I want. If I buy a digital copy (which for some reason often costs more), not only can I not lend it but I can't sell it to anyone either. I also need to ask permission from the platform to read the book I rightfully purchased.

The Google/Apple app store duopoly is another example of this. Apple for example only allows you to use Safari, and makes it very hard for you to have any choice about what software you run on your own device.

It feels like there's a slow slide into a world where we no longer have any choice about what content we consume or how we consume it. Instead, we're spoonfed what the platform decides is good for us, and in most cases good means most profitable for the platform.

</comment><comment><USER45> > The group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the > limited ability to customize it still carries "a high risk of user refusal."

Translation: we used to be able to use dark patterns to get users to consent, now we can't.

</comment><comment><USER46> This ends when the origin site starts proxying requests to the ad aggregators via the site-native domain.

<comment><USER47> Doesn't work for the web because without the 3rd party domain there's no access to 3rd party cookies so the tracker can't identify you that way.

<comment><USER46> First party cookie storage of identifier provided by ad network; Tracking of individuals via various fingerprinting techniques, IP address, screen size, CSS, UserAgent etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Does anyone more well-informed than I know if Apple's recent pivots spells a reduction in ad-based revenue for mobile developers?

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope between this and Apple Arcade, it completely kills off apps that don't give you a choice to turn off ads via an in app purchases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Unlucky, get a better business model.

</comment><comment><USER50> Apple needs to put their money where their mouth is and demote Google as the default search engine in Safari.

</comment><comment><USER51> Can tracking be useful, if used correctly?

<comment><USER52> It isn't even usefull for advertising.

Google keeps giving me french ads even when I speak dutch, live in the dutch half of Belgium, and have a http request header saying i speak dutch or english. I get ads for all kinds of stuff I don't care about. In fact, I get ads for things I can't even buy in my country or continent if I wanted it. If google would tune their ads to the language i ask them, based on the query I entered, the results would be a lot better.

I presume the real value of all this tracking is they can companies to buy ads with them, even if the actual ad delivery mostly fails.

Now I bought a rubber mat on ali express, for opening all kinds of electronics. For weeks they tried to sell me rubber ... stuff ... and latex ... stuff ... and other related ... stuff .... until my wife started mocking me enough to stay of their site for a few months. That's another cost of relevant advertising ;-)

<comment><USER53> Why you even getting ads in the first place? Never heard of uBlock Origins? Stop using Chrome, use Firefox. Then you can put safely Origins on both mobile and desktop for Firefox and never see any ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I know how unlikely it would have been, but I wish Apple just dropped this out of nowhere, because with this delay all the user tracking platforms will now just store the id they can currently access somewhere locally (if they aren't already) and keep using it going forward.

</comment><comment><USER55> > Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook Inc > (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google, faulted Apple for not adhering > to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy > rules. Apps will now need to ask for permission twice, increasing the risk > users will refuse, the associations argued.

DuckerZ in the chat boys. Zero sympathy for ad networks, they're one of the largest channels for malware. We push adblock to all our devices as corporate policy.

The ad space needs more competitors. Currently it's Facebook for boomers, Google for everyone else, and also-rans. I'm fine with Apple forcing their way into this space since I trust them more than the other players.

<comment><USER56> Who is "DuckerZ"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> My TV doesn't track me and it can still provide me ad.

<comment><USER58> > My TV doesn't track me

Are you sure?

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you- wat...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you-watch-tv- your-tv-watches-back/)

<comment><USER59> Op may, like me, have a dumb TV.

You can't buy them anymore, but you can still buy computer monitors with about the same size so that is probably what I will be doing when it goes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Everyone should regularly be reminded that Google was caught paying professors to publish papers "friendly" to Google.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/paying-professors-inside- google...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/paying-professors-inside-googles- academic-influence-campaign-1499785286)

Convincing the public that they are correct is how Google normalized the idea of sharing private information without oversight.

<comment><USER61> They have so many levers to do this too. Their public policy team has sponsored hundreds of educational institutions, lobbying organizations, and think tanks.

[https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/5a1907d78237ab17...](https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/5a1907d78237ab177f4bfbbd3ee71354760419b9c69e03a2610c7ba99427e07a264d199288da7a7025846365c4a0b85ff4016bc2f6e3b9319ed1e980ff8b4cb1)

Then with journalists they use a time-honored tradition Apple has been known for: Managing exclusive access based on positive press. Blogs which promote Google's political positions get exclusive interviews with Sundar Pichai, which when factoring in the ad clicks it brings in, is a multi-million dollar payday.

TechDirt is a special bridge between the two concepts: The same guy who writes the "news" runs a lobbying organization, Copia, which is on Google's public policy team payroll.</comment></comment>


IPv6 penetration paused at 30% for several months - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html <comment><AUTHOR> I've been following this for ages, admittedly it's Google's measure of IPv6 penetration.

It appears to peak each weekend, and then declines by about 5% during the week. But since June there hasn't been any real growth.</comment>


Taxes Prompt More Americans to Renounce Citizenship - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/47064295 <comment><USER2> I experience this first-hand myself. I am a dual citizen of US and Australian citizenship, living in Melbourne, Australia.

Under the tax treaty between Australia and the US, I can declare tax paid to Australia (where I work) and I receive an exemption from paying that amount of tax to the US. With Australia's income tax almost universally higher, this means that I will probably never need to actually pay tax to the US.

However, I still have to _file_ tax in both countries every year. This is made more difficult by the fact that the tax year in Australia runs from July to June, with the US running 6 months offset. This makes the paperwork time consuming and difficult to perform, and there are very few accountants in Australia versed in US tax practices, so I can't even go out and hire a professional who can manage both my Australian and US tax lodging.

Although I was born and raised in the US and in many ways still think of the US as my homeland, I am on the verge of giving up my US citizenship for exactly this reason.

<comment><USER3> Don't do it. Learn how to use turbo tax online. It costs $50, and takes about 2 hours. I don't know about your personal situation, but you are likely very far from owing any US taxes.

You don't need an accountant. Just do it to the best of your ability. It is pretty simple. Income, AUS taxes paid, foreign account list. TurboTax will tell say you owe nothing, then click the e-file button.

Don't trash a US passport over $50 and 2 hours. Once you do it once, it will take about 30 minutes the next year.

<comment><USER4> I thought that most of these online solutions bail very early if you don't live in the US.

<comment><USER5> FWIW I used H&R Block At Home to file my US tax return after I relocated to Australia and it worked fine. Note that e.g. American teachers at international schools have to file US tax returns so there are accountants out there who understand the issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We have a truly insane taxation system.

In a related story, InfoWars goes on their usual over-hyped tirade over the non-travel law being proposed. Even accounting for the usual hype, it is a serious problem to civil liberties. [http://www.infowars.com/irs-travel-ban- revoking-citizenship-...](http://www.infowars.com/irs-travel-ban-revoking- citizenship-by-stealth/) (I tried submitting this story but it looks like the domain is on the auto-delete list)

I really can't believe the system has gotten as bad as it has.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was the tax lawyer interviewed for this article. I have helped dozens of people terminate their citizenship or green cards. Ask me anything.

<comment><USER8> Being Canadian, this strikes close to home. It seems like the crackdown was directed mostly at the rich to target tax evasion, but it has had the ~1 million American citizens in Canada trembling. Many of these people have not lived in the States at any point in their life (often born into dual citizenship), and all of a sudden they're being threatened with penalties for not filing taxes in the U.S.

My last impression from the U.S. Ambassador was that there would be reasonable reprieve for dual U.S.-Canadian citizens. Has that happened?

<comment><USER7> No reprieve yet and it appears that the IRS still wants to take 25% of your RRSP if you didn't file the right price of paper with the IRS. I'm meeting with the IRS in Washington on May 7 to propose an easy remedial system. We shall see.

But yeah. The IRS went hunting for whales and caught minnows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Quite apart from Americans denouncing their citizenship, this absurd tax policy is surely a strong disincentive for many ambitious and successful global entrepreneurs from considering taking out US citizenship or applying for a green card, since many of the same penalties apply.

In my case as a Canadian, I worked as a software engineer for 4+ years on work visas in California before relocating to Australia in late 2010. My wife is an Aussie so I have permanent residency in Australia.

Although I turned off my US job site profiles, I still get emailed regularly by US recruiters asking if I'd be willing to move back to the US. My answer is always no. The opportunity cost of living under the restrictions of work visas in the US and playing the green card queue lottery in a potentially lousy job before your time runs out is just too high.

</comment><comment><USER9> Another annoyance: with the latest batch of reporting regulations for accounts of US citizens, many foreign banks won't let US citizens open up investment accounts since it's not worth it to them to deal with the reporting. (Presumably they make exceptions for large accounts, but e.g. in Germany, where I live, most online brokerages don't allow such.)

<comment><USER7> This is increasingly common.

You know the saying "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"? Substitute the US tax system for internet.

Our politicians and bureaucrats do not understand that it is a very big world. We risk declaring ourselves irrelevant. A large chunk of the world may simply shrug and say "meh who needs you." Exhibit A: China loosened its currency today. You KNOW they are going to pimp it as a reserve currency preferable to the USD.

<comment><USER10> Isn't it funny, when the Chinese don't loosen their currency, it's called mercantilism; when they do, they "pimp [the CNY] as a reserve currency". A case of damned if they do, damned if they don't?

<comment><USER7> Yeah it is a no-win. Not only for the Chinese government but for all of us-- critics will be with us. The Chinese government is taking an action to create its own future. Let's see what happens.

I was a boy living in Africa at the tail end of the Empire. I still remember watching the pound sterling slowly drift into irrelevance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I estimate I spend two full work weeks a year on doing my nontrivial US taxes (and that's on top of paying a professional to actually do that -- that's just the "homework" he leaves me with, which he cannot do himself because he doesn't know the country's internal tax codes and language)[1]. This is an additional 4% tax on my time that is counted nowhere. And the tax professional's fees are not actually deductible because I'm in AMT regime. My effective tax rates turns out to be 10% or so above my official bracket all things considered -- in the sense that I cannot avoid paying those 10% (even if they do not go to the government's coffers -- they come out of mine)

I have income coming in from another country, which makes things complicated. I have to file there as well; I think it amounts to about 5 hours collected over a year to file (and that includes reporting my US based income to that country).

The federal US tax code is 73,000 pages. If you're an average person (you don't have fisheries or hundreds of the other special cases and exemptions), then only 5,000 pages or so are relevant to you (not the same 5,000 to every person - of course). And those 5,000 pages change ever so slightly every year.

If you've been doing your taxes by yourself, it is almost guaranteed that you are either overpaying or did something wrong (or both). Even if you are using a professional, the chances are extremely likely you are overpaying and/or wrong.

And if you are living in the US, you have state tax codes on top of that. Living in NJ and working in NY? You have two tax codes to work with and reconcile.

This is a complementary insane and broken part of the system to what's discussed in other responses to this posts.

In most european countries, if you are a salaried worker, you don't ever file anything with the IRS equivalent unless you have a nontrivial, uncommon situation (e.g., working for two employers at the same time _and_ you do not want them to know about each other; or income from abroad).

[1] No, I haven't been able to find someone who is qualified enough in both jurisdictions. My situation is complicated, though far from unique -- and no, as the "other way around" shows, a reasonable tax code can make filing trivial even if the situation is not.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is one dumb article.

Firstly it's only 1800 people. And secondly of course more people are going to renounce citizenship when the economy is bad versus 2008/9/10 when it was notably better.

<comment><USER13> the econ turns instantly horrible when you live in, say, South Korea and find out that you may owe a fortune to the IRS, just because your dad was /is a US citizen.

<comment><USER14> If I remember right, there are actually rules about that specific type of situation. If you've never lived in, had any substantial economic links to, or done anything that could be seen as claiming US citizenship, I believe you can renounce your citizenship and received a formal waiver of any tax liability.</comment></comment></comment>


Thoughts on Conduits - <AUTHOR> http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2015/07/thoughts-on-conduits.html

<comment><USER2> It's always entertaining to watch how the dataflow programming concepts keep coming up in such different languages and programming models. It would be cool to see this abstraction made at a higher, language and platform agnostic way.</comment>


The Case of Agatha Christie - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n24/john-lanchester/the-case-of-agatha-christie <comment><USER3> > You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked > out

I read dozens of Christie novels in middle school. Somehow I kept getting hooked by the obvious question: "Who did it?" and gobbled up the book until I had the answer.

With my last Christie book I decided to skip the 150 pages of "fluff" and go straight to the last chapter. The immediate gratification allowed me to get busy with other things, but felt so much less interesting than the delayed gratification.

It was a point of no return though and I never went back to another Christie book or another mystery novel.

<comment><USER4> I hope you at least read her books with the biggest payoffs:

And Then There Were None

Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Murder on the Orient Express

The ABC Murders

<comment><USER5> The BBC (it think) produced a mini series of and then there were none recently. Very, very good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did Christie take herself and her writing so seriously? I don't know. I'm not sure it's meant to be highbrow entertainment.

I prefer to imbibe Christie by way of the various TV adaptations. Notably enjoyable IMO are the first three or four seasons of the PBS Masterpiece Poirot series with David Suchet as Poirot, the Joan Hickson Marple television films from the 90s, and the short-lived Partners in Crime series.

</comment><comment><USER7> _The Murder at the Vicarage_ was the first non childrens' book I ever read, albeit in a translation to my native language. I was eight at the time, and found it enjoyable enough, even if it didn't really leave a lasting impression.

Recently, fifty years later, I tried to reread, solely for nostalgic reasons. And must confess agreement with Wilson as quoted: The thing was wooden, flat, and ultimately unreadable - I opted out halfway.

In contrast, a couple of years ago, I read straight through the Peter Wimsey novels, and absolute found them still worthwhile. Wouldn't have cracked them at eight, though. 14 or 15 first time around.

<comment><USER8> Funny, The Murder at the Vicarage was the book I started with about a year ago and I was _hooked_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Like everything else John Lanchester writes, very much worth reading.

</comment><comment><USER10> Am I right in thinking it is impossible to solve an Agatha Christie story before the end, because crucial evidence is always withheld til then? i.e. it's not a "fair puzzle".

Also, the only two fans of her work that I have met don't actually like or engage in the puzzle aspect; they don't try to solve (nor - curiously - <USER2> have a concept of evaluating multiple hypotheses).

These two observations make me wonder if popular detective fiction _isn 't_ puzzle fiction at all...

<comment><USER8> > Am I right in thinking it is impossible to solve an Agatha Christie story > before the end, because crucial evidence is always withheld til then? i.e. > it's not a "fair puzzle".

I'm not sure about impossible. There was one story, Peril at End House, where I have figured out who the murderer was very early on, in the first few chapters or so. It was a weird feeling of thinking that Poirot was being led astray for a while.

That being said, as your other comments say, this is not really a goal for me. If I was serious, I'd lay out the story carefully with pen and paper. But mostly I'd rather just read the story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Behind a registration wall.

<comment><USER12> You can get around the registration by typing in a nonsense address like `email@example.com`

<comment><USER13> How dare you use _my_ e-mail address? (and calling it nonsense ...) ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook was warned in 2011 of data loopholes exploited by Cambridge Analytica - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/03/22/business/tech/facebook-warned-2011-user-data-loopholes-exploited-cambridge-analytica-privacy-campaigner/ <comment><USER2> I guess I dont see the outrage. As someone who has been privy to tools (hidden api enablers) that some would consider darker "hat" I've been able since I was invited to beta test FB Product Ads in 2012, to cross pollinate an audience of people that like mint gum and are fans of Willie Nelson. Throw in local roasted buyers and late risers and I may have a super niche that nails a 800% ROI. Really powerful.

edit - and very happy, high ltv (as the kpi is known as) customers.

<comment><USER3> I have a friend who was working in web advertising back when it leaked out that Verizon was injecting unique IDs into their users' web browsers. This friend said, "What's the big deal? Everybody already knows about this, and at my company we haven't been able to get it to work for anything anyway!"

... I think it's possible to be too close to be objective. We get used to the "power" and not realize that the people who use these services in a non-expert way would consider those same tools "abuse".

<comment><USER4> It's important to consider that when you work in any kind of advertising capacity, you are already part of the problem. Anything you have to say that moderates how big of an issue it is should already be suspect to anyone with even a modicum of critical thinking ability. At that point you could try to ask yourself whether or not what you're doing is truly ethical. Maybe then we'd collectively get somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title is ambiguous. It was Max Schrems who warned Facebook in 2011. And Facebook said basically "no problem", because users OK all that when they sign up.

<comment><USER6> > because users OK all that when they sign up

Reminds me of the "Facebook Security Simulator" game that was made around that time - [https://www.grahamcluley.com/facebook-security- simulator/](https://www.grahamcluley.com/facebook-security-simulator/) and the term "privacy zuckering" was invented round about then to describe this UX dark pattern - [https://darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern/privacy- zucke...](https://darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern/privacy-zuckering)

So while Facebook may be on safe ground here _legally_ there was still an obvious train crash coming back then; when users they tricked into sharing everything find out what they actually agreed to

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Facebook _was_ warned

<comment><USER8> Confused why you were downvoted, this was massively confusing in the title.</comment></comment>


A Glass Nightmare: Cleaning Up the Cold War's Nuclear Legacy at Hanford - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/military/a-glass-nightmare-cleaning-up-the-cold-wars-nuclear-legacy-at-hanford <comment><AUTHOR> > No two of the 177 tanks contain exactly the same concoction, but they all > pose a significant public risk. The site borders the Columbia River, which > nourishes the region's potato crops and vineyards, serves as a breeding > ground for salmon, and provides drinking water for millions of people. So > far, the aging, corroding vessels have leaked roughly 4 million liters.

<comment><USER2> Why not just mix the contents of the tanks together, and then develop one vitrification process?

<comment><USER3> Mixing random industrial chemicals together? That doesn't seem like a very safe solution (if you'll forgive the pun) to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article about the "lapses" of the contractor is also informative:

[https://www.tri- cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article238...](https://www.tri- cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article238286638.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> If anyone comes across this who has industry experience, I would be interested in knowing if the consumption of leaded glass from CRT tubes that cannot be recycled has been considered as feedstock as part of the waste vitrification process, on account of the lead contents reducing ionizing radiation emissions. This seems like an ideal mating of materials, with the end result being large aggregate of slag that might warm but are more stable and safer for humans than they otherwise might have been.

<comment><USER6> This sounds totally reasonable to me. However, i think the cost of processing the waste and storing it long term is probably many orders of magnitude larger than the cost of disposing of CRTs, so the economics of using them would be a rounding error. Ive talked to some people who do research on glassification for the DOE, and i suspect the desire to minimize unknown factors like possible inconsisties in formulation of feedstocks will probably outweigh the desire to recycle.

The cost of disposing of radioactive material is truly astronomical. For example a few years ago i saw a $100k quote for getting rid of 300 Ci of elemental tritium, which compared to the stuff in the hanford tanks is nearly harmless and only has a 12.5 year half life. If you inhale it your body will absorb a small fraction and flush it out as water. If i had to choose something highly radioactive to be put in my body, it might be tritium. Compare that to the stuff in the tanks, much of which has half lives more than 10k years and is "bone seeking" if it gets in your body. Compounding this even further is that there are also heavy metals and other hazardous stuff mixed in, which tends to multiply rather than add to costs. I guess what im saying is this will be massively expensive, and that will probably be the determining factor in most decisions.

<comment><USER7> Minor clarification/nitpick: shorter half-life is generally considered _more_ dangerous, all else being equal (which it never is, especially if you're using Ci or Bq as your units, which correct for this by being disintegrations per second).

The extreme example of this is Bi-209, which has a half-life of order 10¹⁹ years. Of course, it's perfectly safe to ingest, especially with pink dye and a nice bottle!

<comment><USER6> It's true that things with shorter half lives have more decays per second for the same number of nuclei. However, the type of and energy of the decay is very important to the type of health impact it has, as well as how/how long it's retained in the body. Tritium is relatively safe because it emits a very low energy electron (<18 keV), which almost immediately ranges out in most materials, especially water. The only way it can get you is if its sitting right on top of your dna when it decays. Since it's hydrogen, it freely exchanges with the hydrogens in the water in a persons body, and is excreted quickly as a result. It doesnt accumulate in any particular place, which is also a plus. The treatment for tritium is lots of water and a few beers.

Contrast that with actinides, some of which decay by neutron emission, alpha emission, and spontaneous fission. This page has a good breakdown [https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/radiationionizing/background.html](https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/radiationionizing/background.html) alphas deposit alot of energy per unit length traversed, so alpha decay happening inside the body is pretty destructive. Alot of actinides also concentrate in bone marrow, which leads to leukemia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My first official job after getting my CompSci degree was to work for a DOE funded research center focused on remediation techniques under consideration for various decommissioned nuclear energy sites. My job was to develop a multimedia information system as well as multi criteria automated decision making system focused on the various remediation technologies and their efficacy as they were being tested at decommissioned nuclear power plants. Hanford was one of those places. Oak Ridge was another. The job was cool at first but there was no one to mentor me and a large part of the job was to write monthly reports on progress. The reports were very important and they were an important part of maintaining the grant. I think it would take me like a week to complete the reports with all the editing and churn. After a while, I came to hate the work. Wasn't getting valuable experience and pay was not that good. So, I wound up moving to Silicon Valley to work for a enterprise software vendor where one of my buddies helped me land a coding job. Hope they finally get Hanford and Oak Ridge cleaned up!

</comment><comment><USER9> This is my hometown! I haven't grown any extra appendages yet from the radiation if you were curious. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I upvoted your comment earlier, taking your statement at face value and not requesting pics :-) You might like to read the author's follow-up article:

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/visiting...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/visiting- the-city-that-build-hanford-nuclear-site)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's a follow-up piece on Spectrum by the same author. It looks like an attempt to big-up the area and its locals, in case the previous piece seemed like an attack on life there.

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/visiting...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/visiting- the-city-that-build-hanford-nuclear-site)

</comment><comment><USER10> Hanford is a truly interesting place to visit, steeped in Cold War scientific history. However, it's not all historical, there's plenty of new science being done there. For instance, the LIGO observatory at Hanford is a shiny new facility working on cutting edge science. I don't know what if any other work is being done at the site, but it's far from empty.

</comment><comment><USER11> So, uh... anyone else notice that a Supermutant apparently fell into one of the single-shell underground storage tanks? I needed that laugh!

</comment><comment><USER12> So they have spent these billions and achieved essentially nothing. Pretreatment and high level waste vitrification are "deferred". The most dangerous parts of the job, which are required to even start work are deferred. How is this contractor still in business?

<comment><USER11> You could ask the same question about many government contractors. I would dispute calling what they've done "nothing," though. Building a facility of that size and complexity is obviously a non-trivial task, especially when they're having to solve multiple large-scale problems that have never been solved before.

<comment><USER12> Taking 25 years to.build this facility is milking it on an almost astronomical scale. There is no incentive to get anywhere, which is apparently why executives there are being charged criminally. Hand waving about "many government contractors" is bull. This is a shitshow. I love the Columbia River Valley.</comment></comment></comment>


Let's Build a Chatbot - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jonanin.com/blog/2013/04/10/lets-buid-a-chatbot-part-1/

<comment><USER2> ...and for a facebook `likebot'?

Facebook's endless stream of other friend's posts are often a chore to read through and thumbs-up `like'.

A first-order dumb app is to like `em all.

Your Chatbot could possibly offer a modest, relevant, and positive comment?

Is there a Facebook API offering a hook into `liking'?</comment>


Better Humans - <AUTHOR> http://www.dorianemouret.com/better-humans/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is my analysis on why Technology makes us more Tolerant. Feedback welcome!</comment>


WTF? MIT Eliminates Popular 6.170, Famed Software Engineering Lab Course - <AUTHOR> http://www-tech.mit.edu/V127/N61/6.170.html

<comment><USER2> It's actually a really good idea. The curriculum's now separated into a class where they teach you how to code and then a bunch of project lab options where you learn how to code _something useful_ in specific. So if you want to be a web app developer, take 6.005, and then, I guess, 6.171 instead of the hell that was 6.170. GizmoBall and RSS Readers are pretty dumb projects, too...

The real loss is 6.001. :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. By the way, 6.171 is _much_ harder than 6.170</comment></comment>