IPhone share of phone market: 5% volumes, 20% revenues, 55% profit - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/16/iphone-share-of-phone-market-in-q1/ <comment><USER2> This is a very interesting data point. Although Nokia sells over a billion phones a year, this proves that you can target a narrow sliver of a huge market with futuristic innovation and still gain the majority of the profit available in the whole market.

Moreover, you create real value by innovating and pushing the future forward, reaping the reward from that. Nintendo has similar strategies.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, although I suggest that Apple has already proven that "you can target a narrow sliver of a huge market with futuristic innovation and still gain the majority of the profit available in the whole market." Macintosh systems account for 7% of the PC market and 35% of the profit.

More insanely, Apple has a 90% share of the revenue for PCs costing more than $1,000. Although smaller than the market for PCs costing less than $1,000, that's still a huge market and Apple has cornered nearly all of the money in it.

<comment><USER4> I think an important part that is perhaps underemphasized is that Apple has proven that _Apple_ can do this. It's Apple's singular focus on quality that enables it, and it's surely the hard way to do it.

And Apple can do it precisely because it's hard. If it was simply a matter of targeting the high end, everyone would be doing it.

Fighting for market share and making infinitesimal margins across a large market share is the relatively easy and obvious way to do things, and it involves relatively easy and obvious processes of copying/iteration.

<comment><USER5> _If it was simply a matter of targeting the high end, everyone would be doing it._

Everybody _is_ doing it, but their execution is abysmal. They're trying to go toe-to-toe with the leader in those segments without the business and development processes to support it. Apple has singularly focused their entire company on this problem and have the execution nailed. Motorola, Dell, etc. are distracted by the low-margin high volume part of their business and can't focus enough to get it right.

<comment><USER6> You can't create a high end when there's a thriving low-end and its all commodity. Apple does this by prohibiting clones. There's no competition to pull down prices.

In the PC market Dell would love to go high-end, but they can't because Acer will ship the same machine, with plastic rather than carbon fibre, and sell it at 1/3 the price. Apple doesn't have that worry.

<comment><USER7> Yes you can. Lexus, J Crew, AMC tv and many others have proven you can. THe poor and tasteless go for the Crap while the wealthy/farsighted go for the quality/design.

Technology is an echo-chamber. Step outside it and look at what other people have done, then learn from their success.

<comment><USER6> Only JCrew is in a commodity market. Lexus is really more like Apple. While made by Toyota it generally have very different designs, for example the LS460. AMC TV is clearly not a commodity at all, even less so than Apple.

JCrew is clearly in a commodity market, but they're not exactly upscale. I'd consider them the $800 laptop. Not Walmart/Netbook, but certainly not expensive. And there are expensive clothing manufacturers, but there's a reason why Gap sells hundreds of millions in jeans, while $500 designer jean brands come and go like the wind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me a lot of Porsche's situation a few years ago in the sports car market.

</comment><comment><USER9> How were they calculating operating margins?

Lots of Apple bashers love screaming about how Apple has huge margins because the cult will buy any old iPoo, yada yada reality distortion field.

But on the Apple financials call they pretty consistently come in just under 30% on their product margins, and these guys (asymco) have them peaking at almost 50%.

Is this based on some backyard analyst's estimated component cost breakdown? In which case it is a worthless guesstimate, or is it based on official numbers?

<comment><USER10> It wouldn't surprise me though. In Australia I can get a Nexus S for AU$29 a month, while the absolute cheapest I can get an iPhone 4 is AU$47/mo (same plan/inclusions, both over 24 months), with a total cost difference of AU$432.

Internally, they're essentially the same phone. The iPhone is a better built phone to be sure, but I find it hard to believe that it costs that kind of difference. But hey, people still buy them so I can't see the pricing structure changing for the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How is profit being calculated?

</comment><comment><USER12> In other words, you are paying for the brand, not the product.

<comment><AUTHOR> In other words, you probably didn't read the article and would have made this conclusion despite whatever facts were presented.

<comment><USER12> It's not really an article, just a presentation of data. I was labeling the data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Article: A nonfictional literary composition that forms an independent part of a publication, as of a newspaper or magazine: <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/article>

<comment><USER12> Literary: of, relating to, concerned with, or characteristic of literature or scholarly writing: <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/literary>

Charts and graphs aren't writing.

Writing: Meaningful letters or characters that constitute readable matter: <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/writing>

<comment><AUTHOR> I count 6-7 paragraphs of 'scholarly writing.' Scholarly: concerned with academic learning and research: <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scholarly>

You sir, in the kindest way possible, are 100% wrong. You're entitled to your opinion, but not your own facts.

<comment><USER12> Fact: Knowledge or information based on real occurrences: <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/fact>

Language is a convention, not a fact. You are entitled to your own conventions (but I'm going to use the ones others accept for the sake of this post), but not your own facts.

The fact is that if you have more relative profit margins than revenues, that more of the money people are paying you are not going to the costs used to produce the product. Thus, you are paying a smaller % of your money toward the product itself, no matter what value you place in having that product.

You fanboys are seriously rabid, and for the sake of this community, please learn how to defend things you like in a civilized manner (<http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html>) as opposed to the emotional knee-jerk reactions you have. Or leave.

<comment><USER13> I love the admonition to "stay classy" (not a quote) while you name call people as "rabid fanboys" with "knee jerk emotional reactions".

"The fact is that if you have more relative profit margins than revenues, that more of the money people are paying you are not going to the costs used to produce the product. Thus, you are paying a smaller % of your money toward the product itself, no matter what value you place in having that product."

Newsflash: none of this leads to your conclusion that people are paying for the "brand" as opposed to the product itself.

People pay more for good products and service and experiences and they also pay more for brands and some other things. Companies can also increase profits by cutting down on component costs, leveraging scale, with good recruiting, and good management in a hundred other ways. The fact that one product is more profitable then another doesn't imply any of these in particular. The fact that Apple is so much more profitable generally is taken of evidence that many of them are in play. Dismissing all of this as "paying for the brand" is just ignorant.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


One line of code completes a website:AOK.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/apporoad/aok.js <comment><AUTHOR> awesome</comment>


Ask HN: How do you track FOSS releases, changelogs? - <AUTHOR> So I realized this morning (after seeing the post re: NodeJS release) that I'm always having a hard time tracking release notes, breaking changes, new features, etc. It's hard even for the software I'm intimately familiar with and use on a daily basis, and I'd like to get a better forest-level view of the projects I'm using or considering.
Does anybody have a resource or tool that aggregates this sort of information? That lets me filter/select the ones I care most about? I'd love to see something like that. Free product idea if it doesn't already exist. ;-)
Features I'm hoping for, in no particular order:

    - Reasonably common format
    - Filtering/Selecting
    - FOSS itself, of course
 <comment><USER2> For nodejs you can start with [https://www.npmjs.com/package/retire](https://www.npmjs.com/package/retire) "is a tool for detecting use of vulnerable libraries"

For Ruby/Python/PHP/node you can use [https://gemnasium.com/](https://gemnasium.com/)

I thought about creating something similar for Perl once. I'm sure there's still space in the market.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://github.com/nodejs/node/releases.atom](https://github.com/nodejs/node/releases.atom) \+ feedly/slack

<comment><USER4> Yeah, subscribing to the releases RSS of the various OSS I use works pretty well.</comment></comment>


The Weird Thing About Cat Legs - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the-weird-thing-about-cat-legs/459369/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Good article. One difference I've seen between big cats and house cats is that big cats never (as far as I know) tuck their feet under their bodies in the "bread loaf" position that house cats do. I always assumed it was because it put too much pressure on the big cat's legs. So house cats often sit like this:

[http://www.nedhardy.com/wp- content/uploads/images/2014/septe...](http://www.nedhardy.com/wp- content/uploads/images/2014/september/cat_loaves/cat_loaves_17.jpg)

While big cats put their legs out in front, like this:

[http://cbs.umn.edu/sites/cbs.umn.edu/files/public/african_li...](http://cbs.umn.edu/sites/cbs.umn.edu/files/public/african_lion_king- wide_1.jpg)

House cats will take the lion position, but lions do not take the house cat position.

<comment><USER3> Another difference is that large cats have round pupils and small cats have vertical/slit pupils. Probably due to differnces in the type of prey they hunt -- small cats hunt rodents and other generally nocturnal creatures, so they have eyes acclimated to dim lighting. Big cats hunt antelopes and other diurnal animals so they have eyes acclimated to bright daylight.

<comment><USER4> Related: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/08/science/eye-shape-may- help...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/08/science/eye-shape-may-help- distinguish-predator-from-prey.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _We are, I realize, trying to out-stealth a cat. It 's going about as well as you'd expect._

I don't have time read the full article right now, but this pair of sentences alone is priceless...

<comment><USER6> Also this one: _The problem is that, acclimation aside, Pudding is still a cat — an innate master of not doing what you want him to do._

<comment><USER7> As well as the conclusion...

"'We're just doing this for curiosity' Curiosity eh? Maybe that's why the cats aren't cooperating."

Great read, enjoyable. I just love reading about big cats and small cats in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The "weird thing" being: 'A Cat's posture should change as it gets older, but it doesn't'

<comment><USER8> Correction (thanks ams6110):

The "weird thing" being: 'The posture of larger cats should be different to smaller cats, but it isn't'.

"It's famously said that a lion is just a scaled-up house cat," says Anjali Goswami from University College London, who works with Hutchinson. "That's very weird."

<comment><USER9> Still didn't quite capture it:

"When animals get bigger, their posture changes. Their legs tend to straighten, becoming stiffer and more pillar-like to better support their weight. Not so with cats. When a lion strides across the savannah, it has essentially the same posture as the domesticated tabby that slinks over your lap. Lions, tigers, and leopards—oh my—are, as Hutchinson writes, the only large, crouching mammals."

However I agree this article could have been a tweet.

<comment><USER10> I think the article could've stood a bunch of editing, but (at the least to this repeat cat owner) the humour of their attempts to get the cats to co- operate was well worth retaining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Skip to 8 paragraphs in.

<comment><USER12> Seriously...what a poorly written article. 2 paragraphs of content surrounded by fluff.

<comment><USER13> Everyone's opinions are different and we all read for different reasons, but just because an article isn't a strictly factual, question->answer piece doesn't mean it's poorly written. As the article makes clear the answer is still unknown, therefore the purpose of the piece is to both show how science is done, even when it doesn't go as planned, and to get the reader thinking about something they may have never considered before about an animal many of us spend a lot of time with.

<comment><USER12> The article has a title, and the contents don't match the title until nearly half way through the piece, and also don't really continue to match it past there. The length of the introduction is appropriate for a short book, not a 2000 word essay. As the article makes clear, the answer is still unknown, and so the article as titled should not have been written. Changing the title alone could make this a better written piece, but as is it doesn't match the expectations given to the reader.

<comment><USER14> Its the Atlantic, not Science. And its an article about cats as much as it is about science.

<comment><USER12> Title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If any article needed a tl;dr, it's this one. A headline like this, and they bury the lede deeper than Jimmy Hoffa's skeleton.

Thanks, ypeterholmes: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074842)</comment>


The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno elites - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/07/jeffrey-epstein-mit-funding-tech-intellectuals <comment><USER2> This is, in my opinion, a stunningly poor reaction to the Epstein/Media Lab trash fire. You can believe, as I do, that Epstein was a monster and Joi fucked up in the worst possible way and also retain enough independent thought to see this article for what it is: an opportunistic rant by an angry person who imagines themselves the lone voice of reason against a vast conspiracy that includes everyone from wealthy Greek aristocrats (lol) to Bill Gates to Timothy Leary.

Please.

There's a lot to be frustrated by in the culture and cult of tech, but the irony of Morozov posting this op-ed on a site that is usually proudly powered by a mountain of open source created by the sorts of smart kids that spend time researching at the MIT Media Lab is galling.

</comment><comment><USER3> "This single event shows how corrupt this class of people I already disliked is!" is the definition of how prejudice works.

<comment><USER4> It's clear at this point that traditional journalists are opposed to tech because of what it's done to their profession. I don't blame them for being upset, but the way it's manifesting here is not good for anyone.

<comment><USER5> It's not clear at all. In fact it's not just not clear, it's not even remotely true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just seems to be using this event to rant about stuff they were already upset about. The first name mentioned is Marc Zuckerburg, who has nothing to do with the actual scandal.

This is hardly the first charity scandal related to accepting donations from questionable donors. The issue predates electricity, let alone modern tech companies.

<comment><USER7> I am still genuinely trying to understand what happened.

In your interpretation:

1) What is the motivation of the donor (Epstein)?

2) What is the motivation of the acceptor (Ito)?

If your answer is

1) Prestige

2) Money

Then that does not work: they can not reach a mutual understanding about whether Epstein is allowed tell the world he donates to the Media Lab, which can be seen by splitting up in cases:

1) if the mutual understanding is that Epstein _is allowed to tell the world he donates to Media Lab_ : in this case Ito's motive evaporates, because he was fully aware and scared shitless of Epstein's name getting associated with the Media Lab.

2) if the mutual understanding is that Epstein _can not tell the world he donates to Media Lab_ : in this case Epstein's motive evaporates, since it doesn't raise his prestige.

So all the authors of these articles are systematically individually either unintentionally overseeing the inconsistency, or intentionally obscuring a deeper fact.

Let's hypothesize it's for the tax deductions for the root donors (like Bill Gates etc.) instead: this too doesn't make sense, if you find a scheme for tax deductions etc by donating, why not donate directly? if for some reason the tax scheme can only work with an intermediary... why on earth select a radioactive person like Epstein?

So the tax evasion angle is misdirecting chaff too...

Consider that many of the unrecognized victim(s) of Epstein (and the buyers of his underage prostitution ring) are now adult. Consider the typical promises that were made to these girls (money, and _future prospects_ ). Many of these girls are adult women today, possibly studying, PhD studying or working. If some of the girls insist on studying some place, Epstein needs to pipe hush money, scholarship, salaries into the faculties and departments.

My interpretation is that it is hush money.

Bill Gates is not shy, he openly donates to many causes. He wrote books etc...

Before this scandal there was nothing controversial about the Media Lab, so why would he donate anonymously?

Even if he insisted to donate anonymously, why donate through Epstein? Bill Gates should be smarter than that, why are we holding Ito to a higher standard than Gates? If Ito & Co were handling the connection with Epstein with radioactive precaution, why didn't Bill Gates geiger counter crackle beyond repair?

And why on earth would Gates pay off someone else's hush money?

Suppose Gates paid hush money (or was blackmailed by) Epstein for services rendered (say in a somewhat distant past) to forward the hush money to the victim(s) at Media Lab.

That could also explain why Gates would go through Epstein: if he paid the Media Lab directly, the shorter connection towards the victim(s) might be construed as a financial acknowledgement of his involvement with the victim.

It also explains why he would go through Epstein as opposed to involving a clean person: the clean new intermediary between the Media Lab and Gates would be an extra point of failure who could leak the secret.

While it might be relatively easy for the "already-did-his-time" Epstein to find a lab or department head, and convince him with his crocodile tears to cooperate in a cloak of charity to pipe the "compensations" ( hush money, work position salary for the victim ) through the department head.

Instead we have Big Media suddenly (and suspicously) spinning stories and redirecting attention to either academic vaporware like growboxes from the Media Lab, or "billionaire circuits" naturally attracting male and female "deplorables". (which is just slutshaming all over again!)

<comment><USER6> I assume you responded to the wrong thread?

<comment><USER7> no, it was in response to your comment: you write "charity scandal", but according to me it's something deeper which is being portrayed as a mere "charity scandal".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really don't follow. What does Epsteins background have to do with the funding he was bringing to MIT? People aren't one dimensional. What Epstein did was disgusting, it has nothing to do with him funding some MIT research. MIT taking that funding is not in any way supporting what Epstein did.

<comment><USER9> What's ironic, is that's the same mentality that Joichi Ito had to resign for.

Money that comes from illegal or immoral activity colors it. You may think it's the same money, but the source of the money is important for institutions that have moral and ethical standards.

<comment><USER10> No quite. He also hid the donation from MIT, as Epstein was blacklisted. That part alone should get him fired.

<comment><USER9> What? How does that prove my point wrong? If anything, it amplifies my point.

<comment><USER10> In the sense that it's not quite clear if he would have had to resign if Epstein were not blacklisted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why techno elites?

All elites (political, financial, tech, medicine, etc) are morally bankrupt.

They're like regular people, but with power and money, both known corruptors, reduced empathy [1], and all the motivations to increase their reach. And they were probably quite psycho which helped them get at the elite level to begin with [2]...

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth- reduce...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces- compassion/)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Secrets-How-Rich- Got/dp/031637...](https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Secrets-How-Rich- Got/dp/031637895X)

<comment><USER12> Maybe the contradiction is thus:

1\. We expect people higher up the status ladder to behave better than most people.

2\. Getting higher up the status ladder probably means you are statistically likely to be "worse" than most people by virtue of the traits it requires to get there.

(Please excuse the "better/worse" shorthand but you all know what I mean)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought the article, and especially the headline, were overgeneralizing and weak. I looked up the author, and he has _such_ a strong anti-tech bias. His last 4 posts (from [https://www.theguardian.com/profile/evgeny- morozov](https://www.theguardian.com/profile/evgeny-morozov)):

\- The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno elites

\- Facebook's plan to break the global financial system

\- It's not enough to break up Big Tech. We need to imagine a better alternative

\- The left needs to get radical on big tech – moderate solutions won't cut it

</comment><comment><USER14> Donating money to charitable causes is just a way to do good.

When somebody does something good we shouldn't say "That must not be allowed because he is only trying to make himself look good".

Rather than try to prevent bad people from doing good things, we should try to do good things ourselves.

Condemning somebody else is a way to make yourself look good. How? When you say that someone else is bad you are implicitly claiming that YOU are not (that) bad. And you are just spending energy (if not money) to prop up your reputation. That is in fact kinda unethical because you are in fact doing nothing good to anybody else than yourself, just polishing your halo, by pointing out how bad some other people are.

</comment><comment><USER15> Folks should remember that Rafael Reif was the provost under Susan Hockfield who orchestrated the whitewashing of research misconduct allegations that MIT Professor Ted Postol launched against MIT Lincoln Laboratory for using fabricated data to report results of a critical ballistic missile defense test to the Pentagon. MIT was found "guiltless" by Provost Reif after an "internal investigation" was conducted over the course of almost a decade. Steve Weiner (a highly respected former director of ballistic defense research at Lincoln for almost 20 years) has since accused MIT of engaging in a "kickback scheme" whereby Lincoln would tell the MDA whatever it needed to hear about the viability of a Starwars-inspired missile defense shield in order for executives at Raytheon to receive multi-billion dollar contracts to build it. The phony missile defense tests that Postol challenged intensely for almost a decade were one small but critical piece of the massive fraud that MIT has perpetrated against the United States taxpayer here. President Reif needs to be incarcerated, not just fired!

</comment><comment><USER16> In such a fucked up world, how do people even manage to focus on the silliest, most irrelevant issues?

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems absurd to ban bad people from giving their money to good causes. Bad people with money will still have money, whether you shun them or not.

If you take this to it's logical extreme, you only allow bad people to give money to bad causes; especially so because the folks making these determinations allow no room for neutral causes.

</comment><comment><USER18> New charity donation questionnaire for prospective donors...

Have you:

* Engaged in any activities the general public would find reprehensible?

* Plan on doing so in the future?

Are you:

* Generally disliked by the general public?

* Possibly going to be targeted by public outrage at some point?

\---

If you answered yes to any of the above, we regret to inform you that your charitable donation cannot be accepted.

<comment><USER12> I think the first set of criteria are entirely valid. The second half of your post might require more background information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is an angry piece.

The Epstein case doesn't surprise me. Most people with money are morally reprehensible or have dealt with morally reprehensible people.

What I can't understand is where TED talks play into this? Are they evil by proxy?

</comment><comment><USER20> Money is the root of all evil.

</comment><comment><USER21> Kind of weird how they discuss a single case and then literally write that one should "refuse the money of tech billionaires".

Sounds like an absurd overreaction. Worth checking out [https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against- billio...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire- philanthropy/)

<comment><USER22> The important thing is that the guardian/nytimes figured out how to connect this back to tech=bad, which is an ongoing interest of theirs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> From what I've read the first criminal case against him was in 2005 and the dinner with the MIT scientists was in 1999. The donations to Harvard were in 2003. I don't see the value in pointing the finger here.

<comment><USER24> Read some more [https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite- univer...](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-university- research-center-concealed-its-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you have a problem with MIT taking Epstein's money, then you have a problem with money in general. We all take money in some fashion from disgusting, psychotic, and evil people on a regular basis. Particularly so when we're on social security, medicare, or another social program.

It's like the people who are against hunting, but who are happy to eat store bought meat.

<comment><USER9> So taxes are mandatory. They don't change the reputation of a person.

Charitable contributions can make a sleazeball look like a boy scout, when in fact deep down he's profiting on human misery.

<comment><USER10> I agree, but these contributions were anonymous. So the reach of the sleazeball to boy scout effect was limited to the people Epstein talked to anyway, and could see the sleazeballness first hand.

<comment><USER26> They were anonymous because the recipients _hid the fact of their origin_. There are receipts of their conversations about this.

<comment><USER27> Your comment is problematic for Ito, but non-responsive to the parent comment's argument.

The thread is: bb88 proposes that Epstein's charitable giving to MIT was a way to reputation launder ("turn a sleazeball into a boyscout").

davrosthedalek disputed that claim, as the donations were anonymous.

The reason for anonymity doesn't matter; the net effect is there is no plausible reputation laundering effect from anonymous donations.

<comment><USER10> Is it actually known who requested the anonymization? It's clear that it was required to hide it, but was it something Epstein wanted or only accepted? I didn't see it in any of the articles, but I might have missed it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Climate Change Will Get Worse. These Investors Are Betting on It - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-08/climate-change-will-get-worse-these-investors-are-betting-on-it <comment><USER2> Which of course raises the question _what good will extensive financial assets be if all hell breaks loose?_

One possibility for that scenario was explored at HN a short time ago:

 _The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan_

URL= [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17922863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17922863)

<comment><USER3> I don't really get it "let's escape to an island" when sea levels are going to rise and hurricanes are going to get worse?

<comment><USER4> Everyone knows mineshafts are where its at. #MineshaftGap

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TL;DR

Bullish: sea wall construction; short-term housing, including hotels (except maybe those with beach-front lobbies); insurers specializing in weather risk; higher-lying real estate along up-migration corridors.

Bearish: municipal bonds of low-lying cities.

Ethical rationale: What more credible way to put the lie to the "climate change is a hoax" deniers, than to move big capital in these directions?

</comment><comment><USER6> .

<comment><USER5> > under 10%

Source of this number, please?</comment></comment>


JQuery 3.0: The Next Generations - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jquery.com/2014/10/29/jquery-3-0-the-next-generations/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion :

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8529274](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8529274)

Not sure how HN allowed this, since the urls are actually the same.</comment>


China forces birth control on Uighurs to suppress population - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c <comment><USER2> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Child_Nation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Child_Nation) is what they did with benevolence in mind. When you strip that veneer of benevolence away …

The documentary is worth watching, although not the easiest one to watch.

<comment><USER3> There was nothing benevolent about the one-child policy. It was based on the idea that high birth rates were something for poor agrarians, but that the modern industrialized nation that China would become wouldn't need all those people and should in fact prevent them from being born to avoid overpopulation. Then when early efforts to promote voluntary birth control didn't drop the birth rate far enough, they added punitive fines, forced abortions and routine sterilizations to the toolbox.

The switch to the two-child policy was not due to a realization that all of that was unethical, but simply an adjustment of the target. Hence the simultaneous existence of programs promoting childbirth in regions below target, while people who have more children than planned are still punished harshly. It's all about staying on target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> considering China's

* treatment of the Uighurs

* the constant transgressions in the South China Sea,

* their breaking of the 1 country 2 systems promise in HongKong

* their not accepting Taiwan as a country

* their race to blanket the globe with surveillance tech and an ideology where Social Credit System is viewed as a viable route

* invasion of Tibet and genocide of indigenous population there

* current stand-off with India

* their whitewashing of their past crimes (Tianman)

* their cover-up of covid which makes them a threat to global health

* ...

how long will the West wait until they take action? If there has ever been a justification for pre-emptive warfare as envisioned by the neocons during Bush this is the time (I never thought I'd think or even say this).

Every month that the world waits and doesn't go to war with China the stronger their position (and its abuse) will become. We have already waited for 2 generations hoping that China will eventually take humanitarian values seriously. It's not going to happen. Soft power has failed. The world needs to go in and topple that regime.

<comment><USER5> I think we are passed the point where we can win a war against China without major causalities.

It's much cheaper and safer to (1) stop buying stuff from China to create economic unrest and (2) support forces that fight for a more free China.

(Purely hypothetical, I don't really condone any of this)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, this is actually an improvement compared to what happened before:

[https://share.america.gov/china-coerces-uighur-women-into- un...](https://share.america.gov/china-coerces-uighur-women-into-unwanted- marriages/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't really take an article serious if it quotes Adrian Zenz as an expert, he has an online doctorate from a small private college in an unrelated field, and he's a born again Christian and staunch anti-communist.

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

I think it is fair to criticise the two child policy, but acting as if it is targeted discrimination once they start enforcing it in Xinjiang, too, is a bit ridiculous. - the article even mentions that Xinjiang had one of the highest birthrates in the country for a long time.

<comment><USER7> There is a serious problem with the constant lies coming out about the Uighurs. Cut up for organs is one that comes to mind.

So it is hard to see here what is actually going on around birth control in a country that for so long had a one child policy for everyone.

That said this issue dwarfs so many others, like BLM for instance, but the Uighurs gets close to no air time.

This is an ok Twitter feed with citizen investigations using satellite images

[https://twitter.com/Nrg8000](https://twitter.com/Nrg8000)

<comment><USER8> Some atrocity propaganda, i.e. testimony in this very article:

>Tursunay Ziyawudun, said she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations. She now can't have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb, she said.

Ziyawudun last year:

"I was taken to a hospital to undergo a [sterilization] operation, but because I have always suffered from a gynaecological condition the doctor said I could suffer complications that include death, so they spared me," she said.

Dina Nurdbay

>camp which separated married and unmarried women. The married women were given pregnancy tests, Nurdybay recalled, and forced to have IUDs installed if they had children

Her interview with Bitterwinter 4 months ago, zero mention of any "family planning", mostly how CCP is messing with her finances.

Previously there was Sayragul Sauytbay who "did not personally see violence" at the camps in 2018 to "inmates were flayed, raped by guards in front of other prisoners, and given injections that made them infertile" in 2019.

The atrocity propaganda is synced with US movement on Uyghur legislation, this article is probably prelude to actual sanctions from passing the sanction act last week. Obviously we know Trump doesn't give a shit about the Uyghurs.

Ruser does good work. ASPI is reliably anti-China and funded by US MIC, but at least they're data oriented. They're continuing Zenz analysis, though it's kind of crazy no one has corroborated his estimates / extrapolations yet. We're still getting ranges from 180-1200 detention facilities, but basically every estimate from the media basically parrots Zenz, whose estimates went from 250K to 2-3M now. Honesty, not unfathomable for Chinese capabilities, but zero corroboration from many state level actors with the resources to :-/. To add, this is not to downplay what's happening in XJ, we know the camps are real from leaked papers, just not the scope. So far every party has demonstrated behavior that indicate they don't actually care about the truth.

<comment><USER3> > Dina Nurdbay

>>camp which separated married and unmarried women. The married women were given pregnancy tests, Nurdybay recalled, and forced to have IUDs installed if they had children

> Her interview with Bitterwinter 4 months ago, zero mention of any "family > planning", mostly how CCP is messing with her finances.

I assume you mean this article? [https://bitterwinter.org/crackdown-on-ethnic- kazakhs-continu...](https://bitterwinter.org/crackdown-on-ethnic-kazakhs- continues-in-xinjiang/)

I don't think those are necessarily contradictory. That article glosses over a lot with "Dina went into horrific details about tortures in the camps, about blackmailing and threats if she didn't obey the severe CCP rules." and it's possible that "The married women were given pregnancy tests and forced to have IUDs installed if they had children" was one of those details.

In both articles it's mentioned that she was not yet married at the time, so her information about IUDs isn't first-hand. Maybe she heard it from the woman who shared her cell?

It wouldn't be surprising if some inaccuracies were introduced in the process of retelling and translating the story. E.g. it might have applied to only those women who had more children than allowed, in which case it would be sad but also nothing new.

I definitely agree it's hard to tell what the scope of the problem is if articles get written by picking a topic and then collecting a handful of statements by people who mentioned it once, even if they were more concerned with something else.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lucene's FuzzyQuery is 100 times faster in 4.0 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mikemccandless.com/2011/03/lucenes-fuzzyquery-is-100-times-faster.html

<comment><USER2> This is not to pick on Lucene in particular - not 100% sure it even applies - but I'm always a bit mixed when massive speed improvements take place in projects. It tends to validate earlier criticisms about the speed of a particular project which were dismissed (and often countered) by community members.

"Java is slow." "No, it's not - it's hella fast!" "But it takes 4 minutes to launch every Java app I ever use." "Dude, you're doing it wrong - everything I write and use in Java is so fast I have to sometimes wonder if Java didn't magically upgrade my CPU!" etc.

Then a new JVM will come out with measurably faster performance, which validates the earlier view that something was indeed _slow_ , but it's ignored/overlooked/glossedover by proponents.

The other response often is "the code's open, fix it yourself", which generally does no one any good. Just because I'm qualified to determine that something is _slow_ doesn't mean I have the foggiest clue how to fix it. Nor am I encouraged that you'll actually take my patches back (even if I could write them) because you (project team) don't seem to think there's a speed problem in the first place.

This isn't to rag on Lucene's team - I've no idea if this applies to them in particular - it's just something that popped in to my head when I read the title.

The article itself is interesting, describing how the speedup was implemented starting with Python - I won't spoil the rest of the story :)

<comment><USER3> Java _is_ fast for long-running applications. Once the JIT kicks in, important code is natively compiled. But it _does_ take a long time to start. This is why Java is big in the server space, and not so much for desktop applications.

The same holds true for Lucene. It works wonderfully well for most queries. These optimizations are strictly for fuzzy queries, which no one ever used in my deployment at least.

This is the absurdity of performance measurement. Everyone wants to quantify it into a single score. But doing so is like making a 100m track sprinter race a cross country runner. Wtf is your criteria?

<comment><USER2> I was using it as an example - KDE could have been another, or MySQL, or whatever.

The criteria in the Java example - conversations I've had with people directly - was launching and running a desktop app. Things like clicking a menu option and being able to watch the menu draw (< 1 second, but still noticeable). I've sat down with a couple of die-hard Java guys years ago and finally _showed_ them the slowness I would complain about. On my machine - click X, watch Y take a long time, etc.

"Oh, that's fine! What are you complaining about?"

"Well, when I run a 'native' app, I don't notice any of these slow operations."

"Oh, it's fine - that's hardly noticeable at all! Why do you care? Java's fine!" and so on.

So... often judgements really are in the eye of the beholder, regardless of what numerical benchmarks show.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do users actually need to enter this syntax:

 _The QueryParser syntax is term~ or term~N_?

After considering Lucene, I built my in house search engine. I wanted it to work a lot more like google than a "Full-text" library like search engine.

Very few users will go beyond the basics. How many users will actually used Google advanced search? Even programmers? Very few. Users don't use advanced search features.

Why? It's not their fault. They tried. They tried at the library - didn't work. They tried on the early search engines - didn't work. They tried on your Intranet app powered by database full text search - it doesn't work.

We trained them. We showed them that (most) advanced searching isn't worth their time.

Why is? Revisioning + speed. Make it easy to try different combos of search terms really fast. Correct spelling, suggest searches, add the ability to filter information.

See: _Information Architecture for the World Wide Web_ p. 185.

Also available on Safari Books.

See Also: Google

<comment><USER5> We recently chose a Solr/Lucene solution for our game search at Big Fish Games (launches tomorrow!). I cannot imagine writing from scratch many features that come with Solr/Lucene: spelling correction, word stemming (walk == walking), stop words (don't return every hit for "the"), sane defaults for tokenizing (splitting up sentences into indexable and searchable chunks, like words), and uhh soon Fuzzy Query matching.

It's certainly easy to use a very limited subset of Lucene's capabilities to come up with a very intuitive user-searchable index of data.

If you wrote something from scratch that truly works better than an out of the box Solr server, let's just say I'd be surprised.

<comment><USER6> If you can't imagine writing a spelling corrector from scratch you might want to take a minute and broaden your horizons(I know it was magic pixie dust for me before I read it). <http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html>

Stemming could be accomplished just as easily, put in a word get back a list of stems. Just a dictionary look up that could be precomputed.

<comment><USER7> I thought his comment was more along the lines of "I cannot imagine writing industrial-strength versions of _all_ of these things Lucene gives me."

Yes, you can write a spellchecker in 21 lines of code, that doesn't necessarily mean it will be fast enough to be a component in website search _or_ that it will be any kind of a pleasure to query or maintain the word corpus.

I can put together toy versions of many things Lucene provides pretty easily in my own time. Building useful, dependable versions of most _anything_ takes a nontrivial amount of time and effort, so it's smart to restrict my usage of toys to understanding the concepts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My short summary of what the article is about...

Lucene's previous approach to fuzzy matching was to check the distance between the input word and every word in the dictionary. Let's assume that their implementation to compute the distance between two words was linear-time on the size of the largest word being compared. Then, the complexity of this method is _O(nm)_ , where _n_ is the average length of all words and _m_ is the number of words on the dictionary.

The new algorithm uses some precomputed tables that define a parametrized deterministic finite state machine. Then, when the user inputs a word, the word is used to fix the parameters (this is, setting the rules on how to traverse the states defined in the precomputed tables).

From the given information, it is unclear to me what the complexity of this parameter fixing step is, but the paper states that its linear, so we'll say _O(m)_. Then, discovering _all_ the words in the dictionary that are within a fixed distance "d" has a complexity of _O(k+m)_ , where _k_ is the length of the longest word in the dictionary.

Complexity wise, it is very clear that you can gain an X-fold increase in performance by moving from one algorithm to the other, by simply growing the dictionary until you get to your desired X.

Finally, I really dislike the author stating that "Unfortunately, the paper was nearly unintelligible!". I've taken a quick look at it, and it is immediately clear that the authors put a great deal of effort into it. Further, it looks quite packed, but perfectly organized and written in a clear-enough language...

<comment><USER9> _Finally, I really dislike the author stating that "Unfortunately, the paper was nearly unintelligible!". I've taken a quick look at it, and it is immediately clear that the authors put a great deal of effort into it. Further, it looks quite packed, but perfectly organized and written in a clear-enough language..._

It does not matter how much effort is put or how clearly is a paper written, to a someone without proper background it will always sound unintelligible. Put yourself in a position of a person who never studied formal languages theory and try to read it. It is utterly impossible. I do not say that it is a bad thing (had researchers needed to put everything in layman's terms, they would not have much time for actual research left), it is just understandable.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I totally understand that the paper must be very hard to catch for someone without a minimal background on formal languages.

However, the author said that it is uninteligible, implying that _nobody_ can understand it, and then supports this idea by elevating the guy who actually understood and implemented it in his spare time to a wizard status.

Discrediting someone's work that much is plain wrong as I see it, even more if you are using it to claim "100x speedups" in your project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> On the one hand, this does not inspire confidence. It is disturbing to have magic in one's software. On the other hand, the speed gains are really impressive: I'm sure there are times when it is reasonable to make a magic vs. utility tradeoff. Also, it's OSS: I'm sure someone will eventually want to make a well-understood and documented version, and the devs seem like people who would be willing to accept that.

<comment><USER11> I completely agree. There is, of course, always a balance to be struck but it's pretty difficult to ignore 100x speed up in something non-trivial.

Also, I read part of the paper linked in the post. It doesn't seem completely inaccessible, just dense. I'm sure someone will eventually come up with a non- hacky version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm torn between being happy that Lucene is getting a giant speed boost and my concern that the code is doing something magical which the programmers don't understand. If there's a bug and it has to do with the algorithm, how will they fix it?

<comment><USER13> the way they did is exactly what you feared. They got a complex python code and converted it to Java using a converter tool AFAIK.

<comment><USER14> i'm amazed by the text in that post. in general i appreciate people admitting when they don't understand something, but the tone there goes beyond relaxed to, well, a celebration of ignorance (greek letters! oh noes!). is it a joke?

<comment><USER15> It's also confusing to note they don't mention whether they even contacted the authors of the paper to see if an implementation (even partial) had been made, or clarification could be provided on implementation details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting article!

A lot of commenter here are scared of using Magik code.

However note that Search/Information Retrieval is a hard problem. Unlike other problems, developing a generalized full text search engine is difficult.

Testing search algorithms is even more difficult e.g. NIST organizes TREC conference <http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/call2011.html> in which a major emphasis is on evaluation of search algorithms.

In fact Search is as what my advisor calls it, an AI-Complete problem, i.e. creating a perfect search engine would amount to creating a Human like artificial intelligence capable of understanding your query and the corpus.

</comment><comment><USER17> Heh - Mike was exaggerating when he said unintelligible. While we are not masters of that paper, we worked through it and understood the algorithm. We could take a simple example and apply the steps - this is a very different understanding than someone who studies and focuses on this field, yes. Given time, we could have done the implementation without the python code - Mike's recollection of the early part of this story is heavily 2nd hand.

However, even understanding the algorithm (if not masters of all the concepts behind it), there was still a large gap to implementation. The solution that was used allowed us to focus on pieces of that problem and accelerate development fantastically.

Lucene has some of the best tests in open source software IMO. We are confident in this code - whether it takes 2 or 3 people to properly maintain or not.

The option before was a completely non scalable joke fuzzy query or nothing. Now you have this option. Great. A little magic? Sure. Great :)

</comment><comment><USER18> I have some interest in various edit distance implementations. The problem with the basic edit distance is that you need to match each string against all stored strings. This becomes an unbearable computational cost as the size of your corpus increases.

It seems that what they have done here is create a rainbow table of sorts that houses all the possible edits at distance 1 and 2. 3 is possible but requires more space to store and more time to scan.

This is a very interesting problem and has application in many, many areas. I always felt like there was more work to be done here and it looks like there may still be yet. For example, an area that edit distance was initially applied to was in person deduplication. When merging lists of names it is important to identify duplicates and merge then appropriately. This is a problem for me in medical informatics and is more devious than it sounds on first blush.

<comment><USER19> A "rainbow table" works in a somewhat similar manner, but is based on doing a full calculation then saving only certain starting points. I think what they are doing is actually more like creating a regular expression that matches all words a particular Levenshtein distance from the target.

Here's more about what how they are doing it: [http://blog.notdot.net/2010/07/Damn-Cool-Algorithms- Levensht...](http://blog.notdot.net/2010/07/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Levenshtein- Automata)

This article has a very good overview of the options: <http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=114>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> [http://www.slideshare.net/rboulton/comparing-open-source- sea...](http://www.slideshare.net/rboulton/comparing-open-source-search- engines)

[http://www.osnews.com/story/21782/Open_Source_Search_Engine_...](http://www.osnews.com/story/21782/Open_Source_Search_Engine_Benchmarks)

Also there's holumbus <http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/>, an active OSS search engine written in haskell.

</comment><comment><USER21> A few years back I worked on a project that had switched to autonomy from lucene. They'd had problems getting good enough results from automony so decided to plough some money into the problem and go for what was considered the best solution at the time. My impression now is that lucene has come a very long way, does anyone know how they compare today?

</comment><comment><USER22> That's a pretty obscene performance gain. Either that new algorithm was magic, or the one before was pretty crappy. When else do you see this kind of performance gain in production code?

<comment><USER23> As the article says, the previous one was a brute force implementation. And the 100x number is kind of nonsensical since the real speedup depends on the size of the input (the asymptotic complexity of the algorithm went from O(nmk) to something like O(n+mk) I believe).</comment></comment>


Intel Ice Lake server roadmap delayed due to issues with 10nm node development - <AUTHOR> https://wccftech.com/intel-ice-lake-server-roadmap-delayed-struggles-to-make-appearance/ <comment><USER2> "DRIVING LEADERSHIP WORKLOAD PERFORMANCE" indeed! Fun fact: Intel hired AMD marketing team, the same people producing less than honest PR during AMD Bulldozer years (Chris Hook, Heather Lennon).</comment>


Mars Type – Font for Mars Colony (360° Martian Orbit Flight) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhxnVduGc28 <comment><AUTHOR> Description:

> _This meditative martian orbit flight is dedicated to the first multiglobal > typeface Mars Type._

> _I believe that humanity will soon make a new "giant leap" on Mars! This > great mission is worthy of its own font. Scientists prepare to explore new > planets, Rentafont prepares to release the first multiplanetary typeface. > The typeface called "Mars Type" for Mars should be as Gill Sans is for > England or Helvetica is for the whole Earth._

> _Mars Type is sans serif with open counters and other features that enhance > its recognizability and readability. Ideal for way finding and interfaces in > the Martian colony. The main feature of the font is a special form of oval > characters (perfect circle outside, "porthole" inside) and the axis of some > characters (eg. slash) that corresponds with the angle of the Mars axial > tilt – 25,19°. Vertically cut finials, as in Futura or Gill Sans, allow the > new font to have a high capacity, as in humanistic sans serifs, but maintain > visible geometric look. Mars Type was designed by Yevgen Sadko in 2018-2019 > and released on [https://rentafont.com](https://rentafont.com) under SIL > Open Font License (OFL)._[0]

> _My dream is to visit Mars and see a good typeface, chosen according to > rational criteria, for the specific conditions of the planet and the > purposes of the settlers, not just to imitate Sci-Fi movies or famous > brands._

> _If my idea inspires you, please help this font get to Mars! Rentafont is > looking for like-minded people to implement some challenging tasks:_

> _• make a cool video presentation of the font; (DONE!)_

> _• convey information about the new font to ESA, NASA, Elon Musk;_

> _• add Asian and other non Latin and non Cyrillic characters;_

> _• add emojis and icons;_

> _• make a Variable Font with width and Weight axes._

[0] [https://rentafont.com/fonts/mars- type/regular](https://rentafont.com/fonts/mars-type/regular)</comment>


Ask HN: Why not #MultiCloud? - <AUTHOR> Key factors that are holding you from adopting #MultiCloud?<p>Some example factors: 1) Unnecessary or I don't mind Vendor-Lockin 2) Security Concerns 3) No single pane of glass / DevOps Overheads 4) Management Decision 5) No source of truth about Multi-Cloud pricing and features 6) Free Cloud Credits on one-provider 7) Others <comment><USER2> Even if we were concerned about our current vendor lock-in or displeased with our current vendor, maintaining our site on a single cloud already eats up more devops overhead than our team of three and a half server-side engineers can really afford. And doubling our monthly hosting costs in the name of redundancy (we do already have some redundancy within our existing cloud) isn't a good investment given our business model.

Yes, we had downtime when S3 died last year. So did half the Internet. Our customers understood and our business was impacted more by being unable to use Slack for a few hours than by our site going down for that time.

And if we became dissatisfied with our vendor, we would just make it a project and switch clouds. It would take a month or two, but so would setting up a multi-cloud setup. And once we switched we would be done. No ongoing additional overhead.

And if you think there's any sort of API or unifying panel that would eliminate the additional work of maintaining multiple clouds, I've got this really lovely bridge to sell you....

If we had a business and team the size of, I don't know, Uber, or equivalent availability requirements ... sure, it might be worthwhile. But for a small or medium sized startup, the problems that multi-cloud could solve are the wrong problems to be worrying about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

"we would just make it a project and switch clouds. " and "And once we switched we would be done."

That makes a lot of sense.

I'm aware of few startup that use 8 clouds - including barematels from providers that you may not have heard of. Their devops team's expertise overshadows the challenges in managing multiple clouds. it is not practice to expect such level for startups.

>And if you think there's any sort of API or unifying panel that would eliminate the additional work of maintaining multiple clouds, I've got this really lovely bridge to sell you....

Yes - lib cloud APIs is one for Python. Also we at ActOnMagic, tried to support multiple clouds via www.actoncloud.com portal.

So what we are saying is that "Uber scale kind of companies would like MultiCloud?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What is MultiCloud? Can you provide a link where people can read more about it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the jargon.

MultiCloud refers to "using more than one cloud (Infrastructure As A Service) to run their business or production application.

Example: \- I could run my production workloads on AWS for their increased availability and range of services they offer. But might be pricy. \- I could run all of my QA or pre-production workloads on cost-effective/cheaper clouds such as DigitalOcean, Linode, or OVH.

That way I own my destiny. I build my application in such a way that application portability is maintained.</comment></comment>


MacBook Air Vertical Dock - <AUTHOR> http://hengedocks.com/products/macbook-air

<comment><USER2> Here's a $1.99 solution [http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50107051/](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50107051/)

Holds MBP, Air and fits any decor.

<comment><USER3> What about the charging cable?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not compatible with thunderbolt would be a deal breaker for me.

<comment><USER5> Yeah. It's good that I read the note in time otherwise I would have wasted $70.</comment></comment>


Stripe stops supporting Alipay on some accounts (email) - <AUTHOR> Hello,
This is David from Stripe. I'm reaching out with an urgent notice regarding Alipay processing on your Stripe account.
Effective Friday, November 18 at 23:59 PT (07:59 UTC) we will be ending your account's usage of Alipay as a payment method on Stripe because our partner, Alipay, has suddenly changed its acceptable business categories on their network.
What action do I need to take?
Before Friday, November 18 at 23:59 pm PT, we recommend disabling Alipay in Checkout by setting "data-alipay" in your Checkout code to "false".
If you do not take this action, effective Friday, November 18 at 23:59 pm PT, your customers will begin to see the following error message if they choose Alipay as a payment option in Checkout:
"Alipay is currently unavailable. Please select another payment method"
If you have any questions on how to disable Alipay in Checkout, or how to communicate this change with your customers, please let us know and we'd be glad to walk you through the process and answer any questions.
To be clear, this change will have no effect on your ability to charge customers through other payment methods on Stripe, such as credit cards.
Lastly, on behalf of Stripe, we are extremely sorry for this sudden change. This is the last thing we want to have to tell our users that have been impacted by Alipay's change in acceptable merchant categories. We recognize that Alipay has been a key component of your processing, and we're happy to help you incorporate other payment methods on your account in light of this change.
If there is anything I can clarify further here, or any questions I can answer, please don't hesitate to let me know.
Sincerely, <comment><USER2> The email doesn't say that Stripe has stopped supporting Alipay. It says that Alipay doesn't support your merchant category anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, will update the title! (I don't know what my merchant category is btw, it's not listed anywhere on my stripe account)

<comment><USER3> What sort of products/services are you selling?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm the OP, I run a SaaS that uses Alipay via Stripe.

I only have a few customers on Alipay (aprox $200 MRR) so not a big impact I suppose. But very short notice and a bummer.

<comment><USER4> You could try to get them to go to an annual plan and pay you through Alipay directly (10 x Monthly is pretty standard) and manually update them annually as paid/cancelled in your database.

Good luck with the transition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I got the same email. Without Stripe + Alipay, it's tricky receive payment from Chinese users and deposit into US banks :(</comment>


Is This the Solution to Spam? - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=1815&blogid=14

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like the analogy used in this article, but would taxpayers really be willing to pay for their government to send out useless emails?

<comment><USER2> but do they count as useless in this case?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. But how would you explain that to your average non- technical taxpayer?

<comment><USER2> true: especially as the scheme would be targetted as the same set of people.

Catch22 :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> kind of clever, but uhh, someone should tell him about gmail.</comment>


20GB Leak of Intel Data - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/deletescape/status/1291405688204402689 <comment><USER2> This was also submitted earlier, it just didn't gain much traction: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24073178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24073178)

Are there any major implications that could come from leaking internal tools, firmware code, etc? I ask this as someone with no experience in this field and my only knowledge of security is related to OWASP and random, interesting articles I've read here on HN and r/netsec

</comment><comment><USER3> bigger thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24074588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24074588)</comment>


No, I Don't Want a Ticket for the Women's Luncheon - <AUTHOR> http://stronglikebool.com/post/2013/04/10/No-I-Dont-Want-a-Ticket-for-the-Womens-Luncheon <comment><USER3> At the (alarmingly high) risk of being completely misunderstood, I for one think the whole "sexism in technology" is an issue that isn't worth sparing time to think about.

Some people are jerks. That's true of all contexts of life. Jerks should be shunned not because they are sexist, but because they are jerks. If a guy who's a jerk starts a company, he'll probably hire other guy-jerks, miss out on having some balance on his team, and have a crappy company no one wants to work with. If a non-jerk guy starts a company, he'll probably make efforts to create an environment that's as respectful and balanced as he is, and not hire jerks. Respect is important - I wouldn't hire someone who's consistently disrespectful, no matter their gender.

I'd argue that the reason why there's a whole "women in technology" drama going on at all is because a lot of people (quite independent of them being male or female) in the tech scene are jerks. (this is also why this is an even bigger problem online, because as we all know, a large proportion of people follow the GIFT theory online and act like complete assholes, making statements that would get them ejected out of any social situation)

Why are there so many jerks in technology? We could spend forever discussing that, but probably for the same reason that any successful industry attracts jerks, male or female.

The problem isn't worth worrying about in a generic sense. I look at this as a "intelligent, civilised person vs jerk" problem, not a "male vs female" problem. That problem is as old as the world, and as someone who (I hope) is not a jerk, I don't deal with it using generalities, but targeting specific jerks if they can't be coached into being civilised.

In other words, if you identify someone who's regularly being a jerk, deal with them. If you're in charge and you're creating an environment where people are being jerks, look in the mirror.

Otherwise, don't waste time thinking about this "issue".

Edit: Worth adding that this doesn't mean it isn't worth thinking about the issue of sexism in general - that is something where we still have to make a lot of progress, especially in some parts of the world - but that's not specific to technology at all.

<comment><USER4> I think the problem is that, under sexism (and this generalizes to other -isms), males generally don't know they're being jerks. They're not being jerks by the standards of their culture, but the culture is sexist.

For example, I know brogrammers, the kind who use pornographic female imagery in their workplaces and talk slides. The guy who identifies most with brogrammer culture (and makes such slides) is otherwise an incredibly nice guy, everytime I've observed.

Take an extreme, like slaveowners. Does anyone think they were all stereotypical jerks (aside from their institutional role), or grew black mustaches to twirl?

Anyway, I'm in technology, and that's where I can make the most direct impact. So naturally, sexism in tech concerns me.

(And BTW, one insititutional problem on HN is that males outnumber females greatly. I keep that in mind when I see which female voices tend to get upvoted — and which don't. The ones which blame females' attitudes, rather than analyze sexist culture?)

<comment><USER5> > I keep that in mind when I see which female voices tend to get upvoted — and > which don't. The ones which blame females' attitudes, rather than analyze > sexist culture?

With 95% of the usernames here I have a hard time telling whether the writer is male or female, so how could this be the basis of an up-/downvote bias that is greater than the usual noise?

<comment><USER4> We can search hnsearch.com for "poll gender". Males consistently outnumber females more than 10X. We can predict some likely outcomes of such a voting/commenting system, which I think are borne out by evidence. ([https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=po...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=poll+gender&sortby=create_ts+desc))

(Edit: and this linked article is clearly written by a self-identified female. Hope I understood your question correctly.)

<comment><USER6> I think what he's saying is when you're upvoting/downvoting someone, you don't actually know whether they're male or female based solely on the username.

<comment><USER5> Exactly (though my username might be the one exception to that…) – the post I replied to specifically said that apparently only _female_ voices were getting up-/downvoted or that this was only a concern for female voices, so I am a little confused about it.

<comment><USER7> I interpreted it as which _kind_ of female voices got up-/downvoted: the ones that go along with general consensus or those that are critical of male privilege.

<comment><USER8> People who try to accuse a society with generalized claims like "male privilege" get down voted because they are non-specific, non-discussable "facts", negative, and non-constructive in nature. Comments with those attributes are in direct contrast to a discussion board or for that matter, a scientific mind.

Comments that are specific, who's facts is discussable, are constructive in both identifying with facts what is wrong, and suggest solution in a scientific manner will be up voted.

It doesn't matter if its male or female voice doing this.

<comment><USER9> As mtrimpe says, there's plenty of discussion that goes on here which does not have a scientific basis. It's a rigorous standard which is unrealistic to apply across the board.

And I'm sure it's just a coincidence that we as a male-dominated community get especially skeptical whenever feminism comes up.

<comment><USER8> There many people here with skepticism on this board when argument based on anecdote is stated as facts. You might think that this is because of the male- dominated community, but I see the same skepticism when people bring up claim about security by obscurity, the speed of statics vs dynamic languages, flat vs non-flat design and so on. As long the arguments are demanded to be taken on faith, people here rejects them most days.

Why normally demand performance tests and security validation on claims regarding software, but I hear people argue that somehow we should not demand any proof for anything related to sexism? In what way is it unrealistic to demand that people test and confirm statements such as "irc comments are the major reason why women don't participate in software projects". I for one would like to see the average number of sexist comments on 100-2000 observed IRC channels over a set of months, and compare that to a control group of irc channels not related to software development. More or less?

Testing and verification is not unrealistic. Its is unrealistic to demand that we don't ask for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't get the not wanting to attend a luncheon like this. Men have had their boys clubs for a long time. Why can't women have their girls clubs?

If she had a bad experience clothing teddy bears, sipping cocoa, and talking about boys, that's not the fault of these types of events. That's the fault of the event organizer. You don't swear to never receive cash from someone again because you once got burned by receiving counterfeit money.

When I was in high school, I was part of the science club. Ironically (I guess because I'm a guy?), one of the events I helped to organize every year was the Ms. Infinity Conference, a conference where young girls were invited to learn about opportunities in science, hear from women in science, learn about what was interesting about science, etc. I can assure you there was an agenda that kept the attendees focused on the subject at hand. It was respectful and hopefully helpful and inspirational.

<comment><USER11> While I agree it would be silly or her to refuse to go just based on some club she was in in high school, I'd be willing to bet she's been exposed to more women in tech groups throughout her career as well.

This is just speaking from personal experience but a lot of these groups are the "clothing teddy bears and sipping cocoa" variety. It's a little bizarre actually how patronizing some of these events are and it's all self-imposed. It's just too easy to fall into a circlejerk of meaningless talks and discussions about sexism and empty compliments, awards and recognition. I know that's kind of a generalization and not all organizations are like this but I doubt I'd ever go to a women in tech luncheon again either.

<comment><USER10> Self-imposed is an interesting phrase. Interesting anecdote: [http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandberg-sitting-at- th...](http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandberg-sitting-at-the- table-2013-3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm really glad to see an article like this and it's exactly how I feel about a lot of women in tech events. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only woman who feels this way and it's a betrayal to denounce these groups in the midst of all these gender debates we're having in the hacker community.

I joined a women in tech group in college when I started Computer Science. I was super excited and sincerely believed in the cause and I threw myself into it 100%. By the end of the semester, what had I accomplished, really? I had made countless posters and pink ribbons and cutesy giveaways for our school fair booth and what felt like zero progress on making things better for women in tech. Instead, it was just a monthly meeting where we patted each other on the back without really doing anything.

I'm sure there are groups out there that accomplish real and admirable things but I think it's far too easy to fall into just self-congratulating each other and approaching all the wrong issues.

<comment><USER12> I agree with you.

It may be that I'm just partially missing the point of the groups, but I think that what I was actually looking for from women-in-CS groups is "doing very technical things with other women". Most women-in-cs/tech groups I've encountered are more "doing/talking about female-focused things with women who are technical".

Do you think there are groups that do what I was really looking for?

<comment><USER11> There was a blog post a couple days ago that said it really well: <http://trishkhoo.com/2013/04/i-knew-exactly-how-she-felt/>

"that's what happens when we hold events for women in IT when there aren't that many women in this industry – we tend to broaden the definition of women in IT."

There's so few women in tech that groups like this tends to draw some women who are not even remotely technical (I remember for our women in tech group in college, we held an annual networking event where we invited "real women industry professionals" but the vast majority of them were marketing or HR). I'd like to optimistically think that "women that do technical things with other women" groups will become more prevalent the more women enter the field. I'd love to join a group like that but it's difficult in my area where there are two female CS students in my senior level classes (one of them is me).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "I don't know, I couldn't bring myself to go."

This made the argument far less interesting. Preconceived notions are easy. Exposing yourself to something with an open mind, less so.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think there's a bright-line answer for when having groups dedicated to specific issues or points of identity is useful and when it isn't useful. Some women find meetups specifically aimed at discussing issues related to women in technology useful, and others don't. The woman who wrote this article doesn't, and appears to be generalizing, based on a rather limited understanding of feminism and not having even attended the event in question, to argue that no other woman should either.

You find some similar splits of opinion relating to LGBT organizations: some people join them, attend events, etc., while others studiously avoid them and sometimes even resent their existence or any implication that they should attend.

</comment><comment><USER5> What I never quite get…if feminism is exactly the same as humanism, why the hell invent a new word for this wonderful, 200 years-old concept?

<comment><USER15> Because there's a crossover between feminism the philosophical worldview, which is arguably very close to humanism, and feminism the activist movement which has the rather more immediate goal of liberating women from the threat(s) of physical violence which apply to them specifically. Obviously that kind of thing requires a banner for people to rally under.

But you're right it's a pretty nebulous thing. I guess that's why people keep trying to redefine it with successive "waves."

EDIT: also feminism isn't exactly a recent thing either: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette>

<comment><USER16> I find the whole "threat of physical violence" thing objectionable, personally.

Sure, men are generally bigger than women, but culturally, men are trained to not raise a finger against women, whereas women are trained to have no such compunction.

Apocryphal, I know, but I have never, ever, ever, and never will, raise a hand or my voice to a woman, yet have been on the receiving end of domestic violence more than a few times. I'm not a small chap, at 200lbs and 6'3", but:

I've been stabbed in the leg by a stilleto (a heel, not a dagger), for accusing a girlfriend of cheating with my housemate (she was).

I was given a fractured eyesocket by another ex who pushed me down the stairs while she (and I, admittedly) was drunk, "because".

I can cite plenty of other examples of woman-on-man violence immediate to me, but shan't, as my point isn't one of "oh but women are the perpetrators", but one of "humans are the perpetrators".

In a world where practically anyone can lay their hands on an object that in _any_ hands can become a weapon with ease, I don't think it's valid to say that "domestic violence is a result of men, and women, specifically, are its victims".

<comment><USER17> I am sure you can, but statistics are not on your side. Domestic violence is mostly done by men. I hope your choice of companions have improved since.

<comment><USER16> Statistics are derived from crime reports. Men do not report domestic violence against them by women. I went to hospital for "sitting on a shoe" and "tripping and smacking my face on a bannister".

Ergo, whatever statistics you're looking at, sample bias, sample bias, sample bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The site seems to be down for me. So, Webcache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:strongl...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:stronglikebool.com/post/2013/04/10/No- I-Dont-Want-a-Ticket-for-the-Womens-Luncheon)

<comment><USER19> Looks like even this link is having problems

<comment><USER20> Click "text only", at the top-right corner. The Google Cache version loads the original images, and this sometimes makes it stall as well.

<comment><USER19> Ah yes, thanks that worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The women who are beating their "bosoms" to get more attention, probably come off as irritating to some people. But the matter of the fact is, IT "is" a male dominated field. It's not just about women equality in the sense that they should be treated "equally" and not "fairly". As long as the balance of representation is tipped towards men, these women, however loud and tangential they might be, are needed. They are like lightning bolts attracting debate. If everyone just shuts up, there is danger of passively moving back to an even more male dominated sector.

</comment><comment><USER22> I hesitate to write the following, because I don't see anyone say it - <USER2> I'm not looking in the right places?

But Stephanie's description here... it's of course non-coincidental that the teddy bear party is para 1, the luncheon invite is para 2, and both were held under the guise of Celebrating Women in Tech. (I know, I'm Captain Obvious SS3.)

Which makes this maybe 10 blog posts I, personally, have come across (just me, maybe not you) written by women in tech who all have low opinions of Women in Tech conferences/Tech Conferences, _Guest Starring:_ Women. Reasons for the low opinions vary from post to post and/or writer to writer (I can't tell which). If you're reading this, you're familiar with all of them and their various refactored forms, so we don't need to reiterate.

It can't be a coincidence. It just can't be random that so many of these meetups and luncheons and what-have-you's, according to Stephanie, et al., are all teddy-bear-terrible. _I've never been to one, so I have zero clue - all I have to go on is blogger opinion and my own flawed guesstimations of the writer's basis for opinion (intellect, lived experience, etc). So if, after reading the next two paras, you think I'm indeed taking crazy pills, you need to tell me._

It would seem to me, to speak freely, that the common thread in that links Encourage/Celebrate/Defend Women in Tech and teddy-bear-terribleness is: organizers with an agenda _other than encouraging/celebrating/defending women in tech._ Like, okay, yes, Mrs. Weber had her heart in the right place and just Didn't Get It, but I don't mean her. I mean to submit to you that there's a kind of response bias/selection bias/something-or-other bias at play that makes it so that the organizers putting on these conferences are extremely likely to volunteer themselves for lowercase-p political reasons. If I had to guess, I'd guess that they're i) Vitamin-C junkies ("C" for connections, i.e. networking), and ii) they've (rightly?) identified WiTC as their perfect target, their mile-wide bullseye. In an industry of subdivided technical interest after subdivided technical interest, of high/impossible standards, harsh feedback, and of fickle audiences whose attention spans are exactly equal to the number of milliseconds it takes them to hit CTRL-T.... WiT confs are guaranteed high turnout (by tech meetup standards - and if you haven't attended a meetup without a buzzword in the title, don't talk), they're guaranteed to be lauded (by some vocal fraction), the content standards are Marianas-low, and the "return customers," whatever fraction they represent, are amazingly passionate toward the subject and therefore you, the organizer. From the look of it, WitC organizers may as well have invented a perpetual orange juicing machine. Or if any of you read Phantom Tollbooth as a kid, "Subtraction Soup" (the more you eat, the hungrier you get) but like with lots of Vitamin-C in it or something and also the secret ingredient is heroin.

Oh and as for why there aren't (m)any good organizers, i.e. the kind that hated the teddy bear factory: if there were an equation that described Eternal Septembering, it would include p^3 where p is how mainstream party-political (as opposed to body-political, the way Assange uses the terms) the topic of discussion is. So like r/politics has seen several geological epochs worth of Septembers at this point. The bigger and louder and more influential your pet WiT conference grows, the faster Jezebel & Co. will show up and start beating their bosoms, as Stephanie so eloquently put it.

No TL;DR. First time submitting a crazy pills idea for public criticism, you have to say things the way you've been thinking them.

</comment><comment><USER23> Over 90% of children whose parents went through divorce end up with mother. Somehow we came to believe that women can be as good employees as men and we enforce it by law. At the same time we're still in middle-ages thinking that a male can't be as a good parent as a female. It's all very one-sided. As long as women get what they want. It definitely is not about _equal_ places in the society. Women got more in the past 50 years, men lost their natural advantage in the workforce but still are destined to fullfil typical, stereotypical roles in their families (a.k.a 'providers'). I'm sorry, but it just doesn't add up.

<comment><USER24>
      Somehow we came to believe that women can be as good
      employees as men

      men lost their natural advantage in the workforce

To be able to make these claims so boldly .. you must have no shame whatsoever.

<comment><USER23> so you need to take it out of the context to call me shameless? You changed the meaning and you know it.

Better downvote without commenting if you have to employ dirty tactics like this.

EDIT: typo meaning instead of meaning _s_

<comment><USER24> In what context could those statements (1) make any sense, or (2) be in any way acceptable? And further, you wrote one piddling paragraph. Any reader can plainly find the context: It is that you believe in gender roles so strong, it sounds as though you are an early 19th-century time traveler who just hopped out his ship. You conceal this in what I think boils down to, "men are better at everything," but it's clear you think that women belong in the kitchen and men in the mineshaft (especially when reading your other comments for this article).

<comment><USER23> If traditional gender roles are NOT so strong with you, why you are the one so strongly defending "XIX Century" role of a father "provider" who can't be a good parent and gets the children in less than 10% of divorce rulings?

Somehow when talking about employment 50/50 rule is very forward thinking, but if somebody would dare to employ the same rule to divorce court rulings it's "19th century".

So when at work we are all forgetting about the traditional family rules, but when in the court law having a divorce case we can be as sexist as we were 100 years ago?

That's your progress? As long as it is better just for one gender it is good? That's how you fight sexism?

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure if your original choice of words was regrettable, or if you're trying to cover a retreat. The tenor of your comments (here and elsewhere) certainly suggests the latter. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former .. never use "natural" when you mean "historic." And " _Somehow (emphasis added)_ we came to believe that women can be as good employees as men" implies that you find this unbelievable. Maybe you didn't mean it that way, but that is exactly how it sounds.

<comment><USER23> No, no, no. I did use the word "natural" as intended. I did mean that there are natural roles in the society for men and for women. As the proof I provided that the natural roles are still there in the courts of law. Apparently in the eyes of courts males are not as good parents as females. That's the law. Because apparently that's _natural_. And you seem to be fine with that _natural_.

If the natural order of things works in women advantage, you're fine with it not being changed in the past 100 years or so. Let the courts rule in favor of women to have right to the kids. You seem to have a problem only and only when female sex is at disadvantage.

Let me be cynical here to get my point accross: I strongly believe that it is natural for men to be income providers. As you seem to strongly agree that it is _natural_ that women are the ones getting rights to the children in over 90% of divorce cases. So, isn't that dishonest to laugh at me that I believe in natural sex roles in the society when you obviously do believe in them as well?

You see, why don't we talk about this that it is 19th Century mentality to give kids to mother in over 90% of the divorce cases? How came it works only one way?

That's the point I wanted to get across, not to argue about single words semantics.

<comment><USER24> You've really gone off the deep end now. At least you've completely contradicted your "progressive" defense earlier, and now it is transparent that you have antiquated views about very strong gender roles.

      So, isn't that dishonest to laugh at me that I believe in
      natural sex roles in the society when you obviously do
      believe in them as well?

Seeing that I haven't stated any of my own views, other than that I find yours very distasteful, I've got a hunch we agree on very few things about this.

      And you seem to be fine with that natural.

      You seem to have a problem only and only when female sex is at
      disadvantage.

      So, isn't that dishonest to laugh at me that I believe in natural sex
      roles in the society when you obviously do believe in them as well?

Don't use me as your straw man, please.

<comment><USER23> >Don't use me as your straw man, please.

Well, I'm sorry, but you should have stated where you stand on the issues instead of worrying about semantics. Not to mention first patronizing me and now victimizing yourself.

Would you be in favor of a law requiring that the half of all the divorce cases must end with the kids staying with the father?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Flywheel Raises $1.2M for Its Designer-Centric WordPress Hosting Platform - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/05/flywheel-raises-1-2m-for-its-designer-centric-wordpress-hosting-platform/

<comment><USER2> I like the project, but I'm not convinced about the pricing model constrained by visits. Especially the bulks/freelancers where -I assume- the number of visits depends upon the freelancer's clients. Not to mention 10$/m for TLS...

Congrats for the round, btw!

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Flywheel to host Signal Tower, and they have been incredibly friendly.

They also make it incredibly easy to build sites and transfer them to clients, which has been a pain at work in the past. They are really the ideal host for freelancers building small WordPress sites for clients that aren't going to do maintenance.

Congrats to Rick and the Flywheel team!

</comment><comment><USER4> Odd choice of name, when flywheel.com is owned by the "official" SF cab- hailing app.

<comment><USER5> and there is also [http://www.flywheelsports.com/](http://www.flywheelsports.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congrats to Dusty and team!

</comment><comment><USER7> $10/month for a hosted wordpress platform? No thanks. Name.com's Rapidpress is $2.50/month and offers practically the same thing.</comment>


Accused iPad hacker Weev speaks at Occupy Wall Street - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9nKaU1LJxw

<comment><USER2> SWAT Teams are raiding the homes of cheese makers???

Once again, a message that may start out strong, but looses the plot about 1/3 of the way in. Don't tell me about people who have been beaten and murdered, show me. In this society, I need proof. The voice of a random person on YouTube isn't enough for me.

As someone who has apparently taken empowered steps to expose corporate irresponsibility, you'd think that he would be able to use the technology at his fingertips to provide more than a rant about the injustices he speaks of.

Also, there are lots of crazy old laws that don't get enforced yet never were taken off the books. Bringing them up here doesn't help your case, it actually shows that you are as out of touch as the law makers who never cleaned up their stuff.

There are enough tangible issues to fix that going into the things that people can't relate to, or can easily refute causes the movement to go backward rather than forward.</comment>