AMD and Intel Had a Baby and It's a Beast - <AUTHOR> https://seekingalpha.com/article/4164382-amd-intel-baby-beast <comment><USER2> $999 for something that can only handle 1080p at smooth framerates?

Yes it's small, but you can build a mini-itx based motherboard system with either ryzen or 8th generation intel core i-whatever and a discrete $125 GPU that will probably run circles around it.

50-60 fps in doom at 1080p is not incredibly impressive, and that's for a single display. Now double that for two eye displays for VR and it'll fail to provide a smooth frame rate.

The specs from Anandtech show it as $999 barebones and about $1615 of total components once RAM and SSD have been added. And it has a huge external power brick. Once you look at the size of the unit + power brick it's not much smaller than a cube shaped mini-itx case in terms of space occupied.

For $1615, given two limitations (a) mini-itx case and motherboard and (b) use of discrete pci-express x16 3.0 nvidia GPU, i could build a system with _significantly_ higher framerates in all tests.

<comment><USER3> For $1615 you could easily build a mini-ITX system with an i7-8700 and a Vega Frontier Edition GPU. I'm assembling one now, but with a RX 580, which ultimately cost me $1k (paid too much for the RX 580 because of the damn shitcoin craze driving up GPU prices)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Link to the product spec: [https://www.simplynuc.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/02/SimplyN...](https://www.simplynuc.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/02/SimplyNUCProductBrief-NUC8i7HVK.pdf)

This thing sounds amazing at $999. I just wish I had any need to upgrade.

<comment><USER5> That's the base unit. You need to add the OS, mem and who knows what else. Expect to pay $1500+

<comment><USER4> >That's the base unit. You need to add the OS, mem and who knows what else. Expect to pay $1500+

It comes with 8GB and Linux is free. So it's more like $150 worth of DDR4 and you're set.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. It is Kaby Lake, Not Coffee Lake, no hardware fix for Meltdown and Spectre.

2\. It isn't Vega, despite they claim it is.

3\. It is ridiculously expensive for what it offer.

4\. It isn't actually 100W TDP, actual testing shows it is close to 180 - 230W.

5\. Seekingalpha wants people to buy Intel Stocks, which isn't exactly doing great at the moment, and has no future roadmap that points to growth, while I could list 4 pages of threats coming after them.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't finish reading the article, it asks me to install an app.

</comment><comment><USER8> They seem to just be reaching reviewers finally[1]. Looks like a great machine, tiny footprint, enormous horsepower (comparatively).

1: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/12572/the-intel-hades- canyon-...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/12572/the-intel-hades-canyon- nuc8i7hvk-review-kaby-lakeg-benchmarked)

</comment><comment><USER9> SeekingAlpha really isn't qualified to call a CPU a "beast".

Arstechnica or Engadget would be much better qualified to make that proclamation.

</comment><comment><USER10> 4 pages?!

It looks interesting, but I would love to see such device with pure AMD stuff</comment>


Now is the worst time ever to buy an Android phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2012/03/22/now-is-the-worst-time-ever-to-buy-an-android-phone/

<comment><USER2> _Android phones have never been as impressive as they are today. They have never been as responsive, as slim or as powerful. Their displays have never been more vivid or more stunning. Their data speeds have never been as fast._

Yes, that's true right now. It was also true 2 years ago. It will be true next year, too. Every successive generation has to be better than the last.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article SHOULD be titled "Now is the worst time to get locked into a two year contract".

Blatant crap IMO.

<comment><USER4> yeah. that will always be "true" btw.

at every point in time you could say "don't buy gadget X because any time now they will have gadget Z available". and you will be correct. works for cellphones, cars, kitchen knifes. anything.

<comment><USER5> My 10 year old kitchen knife compares favourably to a new one.

<comment><USER4> So does my 5yr asus netbook. but plenty of people would say otherwise for both.

<comment><USER5> That's a pretty dumb comparison.

With regular sharpening, a kitchen knife can be just as effective as a brand new one for decades. It'll cut food just as quickly and efficiently.

A laptop may be workable, but it's going to become underpowered in empirical ways fairly quickly.

<comment><USER4> as is missing the point of an exaggeration.

but again, my 5yr laptop still does everything i need at the same speed as it did 5yrs ago.

in fact, using the 3.1 kernel i think it's even faster than 5yrs ago.

on the other hand, 2yr of sharpening my san mai honyaki blade made the balancing impossible to cut the sashimi slices i used to cut when it was new. They came out too irregular now.

Also, if i had waited only 3 months before buying that knife, i would be able to buy the newer model with the nicer black handle instead of brow, which was only available to the Maguro bōchō at the time. I still regret it to this day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "and it features a 1.5GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor, a 4.6-inch 1,280 x 720-pixel Super LCD 2 display, an 8-megapixel ...." blah, blah..

What about heat profile, battery life, and cost? Spec-lists may sway some buyers, but most folks want to know how they can use those specifications to make calls and do tasks.

<comment><USER7> Also: these are all huge screens.

<comment><USER8> I wonder where this is heading. Either that's going to turn up to be an unusable medium between tablets and phones, or we're watching the evolution of the "personal computing device" who just happened to be that smaller because they started out as phones. I bet it won't be long until someone calls out the "post-phone era"…

(I'd bet against it, due to the pretty constant constraint of jeans and jacket pockets.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Of course phones are gonna get faster, more memory, better screens. Honestly though, I just got a new droid, and yeah it's better than the old one, but not 2 years difference like it used to be.

I don't give a damn about specs. I care what I can do with the phone. I was hoping this article was going to go in the direction of HTC is releasing a beautiful and blazingly fast phone that integrates Dropbox storage (which is true), improved speech controls, and a smart notification system that figures out when you want to get things done.

</comment><comment><USER10> >> These new smartphones will be slimmer, sleeker and more capable than anything on the market today...

I have a year-and-a-half old iPhone. It has a great camera, a great screen (the first "Retina" screen), and it is plenty fast and the battery lasts about 36 hours with normal use. All of the new features in newer phones are marginal improvements over my current phone; the newest android phones are not leaps and bounds greater than the previous generation. They are ~20% better, maybe?

The point is, this guy is probably just obsessed with having the latest and greatest, even if it's only slightly better than phone he bought 3-6 months earlier. Most people probably aren't that crazy about technology, and don't have the resources to buy a phone more than once every two years.

</comment><comment><USER11> The author completely didn't discuss the negatives -- the battery. The largest battery life between the phones mentioned is 1800 mAh. This is just over half of the battery capacity of the current-generation Droid Maxx (3300 mAh) - which still has a slim profile and speedy processor.

For me, the 3300 mAh battery life is a definite current-generation game- changer. Not having to charge my phone throughout the day, no matter how much I use it -- and not having to carry around an extended battery -- is what I care about. I'd gladly take that over a higher-res screen.

</comment><comment><USER12> _For tech savvy smartphone users, committing to a two-year contract is brutal. Mobile technology moves so fast that smartphones can seem outdated just months after they launch._

There is a simple solution to this. Just choose a plan that doesn't contain a subsidized phone. It's cheaper which means you have money left for the phone you desire. Once that is outdated, just sell it on ebay or wherever and purchase a new phone. And so on. Of course, the new phone will cost more than you get for the old one, but you really can't have everything.</comment>


I Was a Sock Puppet for the CIA - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/222592/i_was_a_sock_puppet_for_the_cia.html

<comment><USER2> Ugh, linkbait of the worst kind. Second sentence:

"Well, not really. But I could be, and so could you, thanks to a plan by the US military to create fake online personae to spread pro-US propaganda."

(Yes, the now-old story about the persona management software solicitation)</comment>


The universe's resolution limit - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/the-universes-resolution-limit-why-we-may-never-have-a-perfect-view-of-distant-galaxies-50993 <comment><USER2> I'm but a dumb computer developer but I have often wondered if it possible (not now but way into the future) to make a telescope like detector based on neutrinos. Although you still have the resolution problem I think neutrinos are affected by different things than photons (ie ambient light should not be a problem). I know there are neutrino detectors but none of them show the shape of galaxies (I think).

<comment><USER3> The fundamental question is: if neutrinos provide a better signal because they overall interact much less than photons (a visible photon coming from the farthest corner of the universe will stop running as soon as it meets my eye; a neutrino can cross a star without noticing), how will you get them to interact with your telescope? That's a big problem for direction detection, too: with a telescope, it's easy to determine which direction the light comes from, as it can cross the front glass but not the surrounding casing. When a neutrino (out of several billions crossing your detector) finally gives a signal, you can't even know whether it's coming from the sky or out of the Earth!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I only studied through an undergrad modern physics level. Is this talking about planck length or something else?

<comment><USER5> No, it's talking about optical resolution. If you were to make an image of the universe surrounding our Solar System and galaxy, there's a maximum number of pixels that you could zoom in and see before everything gets fuzzy due to spacetime warping the path of the photons as they made progress through the universe. (Like taking a photo through frosted glass, except the frosting is much finer here.)

<comment> Ono-Sendai It is talking about planck-scale stuff though. And the effect is pure conjecture.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, if you mean it that way then the conjectured phenomenon providing the fuzzing seems to be basically at-or-around Plank-scale stuff which arises from having the Heisenberg uncertainty principle around (because there's a hard boundary on the precision with which a process could demonstrate that space is _empty_ , so in practice, it's not strictly empty, just a close approximation that's can have quantum fluctuations).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If this affects only the most distant observations, I wonder if this can already be detected in our observations of the CMB.

</comment><comment><USER7> Url changed from [http://phys.org/news/2015-11-universe-resolution-limitwhy- vi...](http://phys.org/news/2015-11-universe-resolution-limitwhy-view- distant.html), which points to this.</comment>


A platform full of opportunities for students - <AUTHOR> https://gradbee.com <comment><USER2> "Connect with India's best students". Well that's a pity.

<comment><AUTHOR> the website is in development, we have implemented mobile verification across the globe.

<comment><USER2> So it's not limited to Indian students as stated in the recruiters section?</comment></comment></comment>


Ethical OS and Silicon Valley's Guilty Conscience - <AUTHOR> https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2018/08/24/striving-to-minimize-technical-and-reputational-risks-ethical-os-and-silicon-valleys-guilty-conscience/ <comment><USER2> This is an excellent time to ask for a counterargument to CGP Grey's stance that immortality should be invented: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY)

Suppose there were a technology X which was going to be invented eventually. Suppose also that it's a highly unethical technology, for some definition of unethical.

Is it therefore unethical to create X?

Note: The constraint is that X _is inevitable_. The only question is who creates it first. And in that context, isn't it at least possible to argue from multiple axes that you should help to create it? The limit case of this argument would be "It's your duty to the society you live in to ensure it has the competitive advantage, not some other society."

A less-hostile way to phrase that would be "The first company to invent a technology can then try to _enforce ethics_ onto that technology."

That is, if you invent something, it's easier to dictate how it's used than if you didn't.

Hence, paradoxically as it may seem, the logical conclusion would _seem_ to be that you should work as hard as you can to invent whatever unethical technology you're worried about -- in the hopes that you can minimize the damage later.

If it seems like a technology can't really be controlled (e.g. nuclear weapons), I counter with this: Bitcoin was the implementation of a set of ideas. The exact implementation could have been very different. It could have been inflationary rather than deflationary, for example. The precise choices were very important, because Bitcoin has huge first-mover advantages. And that is often true of the first X to be invented.

So, what's the answer? Do we work as hard as we can to invent unethical technologies in order to mitigate their effects, or do we try to suppress or discourage the invention of new technology knowing that some less-"ethical" society will get there first?

Or is that a false dichotomy? I'm fascinated by the possible answers.

<comment><USER3> Whoever invents it is responsible for it. You could argue that extremely deadly nerve gas would have been invented _inevitably_ , for instance, but it is still unethical for you to help in its development. Claiming that "someone else would have invented it anyway" is the oldest excuse in the book.

 _Do we work as hard as we can to invent unethical technologies in order to mitigate their effects, or do we try to suppress or discourage the invention of new technology knowing that some less- "ethical" society will get there first?

Or is that a false dichotomy?_

This looks like a false dichotomy to me. If your argument was sound, then e.g. attempting to limit nuclear proliferation would be pointless, since every nation on earth would eventually develop nuclear weapons anyway. I don't think that's true, though, national and international laws with suitable enforcement can prevent unethical technologies.

<comment><USER2> Think of a war that shaped the world, and whose outcome is generally agreed to be a positive one: "Good guys vs bad guys, and the good guys won."

Suppose nerve gas had been the only way for the "good guys" to win that war. (This isn't a realistic assumption; the point is to examine ethics.)

Is it more ethical to employ the nerve gas, or to lose the war? Those being the only two outcomes.

<comment><USER4> Same guy as before but from different account. Disclaimer: I am an ethicist, although my original AoS was philosophy of language.

First of all, there is a whole bunch of contemporary ethicists who would deny that unrealistic scenarios can give us any ethical insight, but let's not enter this debate.

There are good and convincing arguments against this view, but let's assume for the sake of the argument that using the nerve gas in your scenario would be the right thing to do. That means that you have shown that there is one hypothetical scenario in which the use of that technology could be considered better than not using it, although its use would still be very bad and horrific.

That's not enough to show that the technology is ethical or that its development should be encouraged. I'd argue for the opposite. Your scenario also does not provide any argument against my claim that the person who develops the technology is at least indirectly responsible for its later use. Some technologies should and maybe even need to be suppressed world-wide.

This is an important topic if you take into account the pace of technological development. It's entirely thinkable that in the near future - let's say, in a 100 years or so - just about anyone could in theory genetically modify bacteria and viruses to his likings in a basement and for example develop an extremely powerful biological weapon capable of wiping out 90% of mankind. It is obvious that such a technology has to be suppressed and should probably not be developed in this easy-to-use form.

I believe what you really want to say is that nation states should develop all those nefarious technologies in order to control their spreading, because someone ("the opponent") will invent and spread them anyway. That's indeed the traditional rationale for MAD and the development of nerve gas, biological weapons, and hydrogen bombs. The problem with this argument is that anybody can use it, the argument appears just as sound to North Korea than to the US, and is leading to a world-wide stockpiling of dangerous technologies. So there must be something wrong with that argument, don't you think so?

<comment><USER5> > That's indeed the traditional rationale for MAD and the development of nerve > gas, biological weapons, and hydrogen bombs. The problem with this argument > is that anybody can use it, the argument appears just as sound to North > Korea than to the US, and is leading to a world-wide stockpiling of > dangerous technologies.

But that's not what happened, right? I mean, it is if you stop reading history just before the first non-proliferation treaties began being implemented. This was almost half a century ago, though, so IMO it doesn't make sense to stop reading at that point.

<comment><USER4> I agree. The solution to massive technological threats is mutual entanglement by treaties and international laws that limit or prohibit the development of dangerous technologies. That's my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Many (many) years ago, I was leading business planning for Demon / Thus and as part of our template introduced "Conscience Breakers" \- a section (much like the health and safety planning for school trips i guess) that asked what could go wrong with our products we were about to launch. It seemed a good idea then and still does.

it got dropped pretty quick by the higher ups

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great, but can this really be followed by companies that have shareholders and investors?

<comment><USER8> Could you go into some detail on why it couldn't be followed by them? I know of some different arguments about why it could or couldn't, but I don't know what you are referring to.

<comment><USER9> The answer is that publically traded companies face heavy pressure to keep sustained quarterly growth indefinitely and various "activist" investors will insist upon ousting any who stand in the way even if it is better for longterm health not to say lay off experienced engineering staff in a stable industry to inflate quarterly profits (Boeing) when it comes to bite them with electrical fires in their next big plane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Most change is bad. Some change is necessary.</comment>


Ask PG: Are you an atheist? - <AUTHOR>

This comment by John McCarthy the creator of LISP whom you greatly admire, made me curious:<p>"Responding to Richard Dawkins's pestering his fellow atheists to "come out", I mention that I am indeed an atheist. To count oneself as an atheist one need not claim to have a proof that no gods exist. One need merely think that the evidence on the god question is in about the same state as the evidence on the werewolf question." <comment><USER2> "One need merely think that the evidence on the god question is in about the same state as the evidence on the werewolf question"

Most theologies that I'm aware of might balk at the way McCarthy expresses that but, after clarifications all around, would emphatically agree. Indeed, the two are comparable. Faith is called "faith" for a reason.

Also, it is generally considered rude to publicly inquire about the details of another person's faith in such a confrontational manner as you've done here, however well you are intended or whatever McCarthy means. I think it is a safe bet - and he can correct me if I'm wrong - that McCarthy (and Dawkins) were encouraging personal choices, not externally pressured choices.

[That came off pretty condescending so maybe now I'm the horribly rude one. I hope people understand and agree with my intent here, though. Wrong question, wrong forum.]

<comment><USER3> The word 'curious' in the OP's question doesn't jive with the word 'confrontational' in your reply, IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Based on <http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html> I suspect that pg will not answer.

It is worth pointing out that in my personal experience there is little to no correlation between intelligence and religious affiliation. John McCarthy is very intelligent and an atheist. Don Knuth is very intelligent and deeply religious. Martin Gardner was very intelligent, religious, and was very conscious of the fact that he could not logically justify his religious beliefs. I could give you more examples indefinitely.

Pointing to yet another intelligent person who is somewhere on this spectrum demonstrates absolutely nothing, and I believe that pg fully understands that. No matter what his religious beliefs are, for him to answer would only serve to potentially upset people who believe differently. Why go there?

<comment><USER3> Your personal experience appears to differ from peer-reviewed studies...

<comment><USER4> I'm fully aware of the peer-reviewed studies that you mention. The correlations they find are highly statistically significant, but the correlations are fairly weak. For instance one study found a 5.83 point gap between the IQs of atheists and dogmatically religious people. That is significant over a large population, but not for individuals. And our society has so many more dogmatically religious people than atheists that there is no problem in finding lots of very intelligent, dogmatically religious people.

Also the cause of that is far from established. For instance religious belief and ethnic background are strongly correlated, and ethnic background is more strongly correlated with IQ than IQ is with religious belief. How much of an effect does this have? It is hard to quantify.

Therefore I wouldn't put much weight on those studies. Don't pat yourself on the back too much for being an atheist, because it doesn't say much either way for your intelligence.

(Disclaimer. I am an atheist. But I know plenty of people who are much more intelligent than me who are strongly religious.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes.

</comment><comment> s-phi-nl See his reply, but I had already inferred that he was from that he considers religion a lie in <http://paulgraham.com/lies.html></comment>


ThePirateBay.se Should Put Magnet Links in Meta Descriptions - <AUTHOR>

After The Pirate Bay got banned by major ISPs in the U.K. I was thinking about how they might help users circumvent the block.
Seeing as the site still appears in Google, Google is essentially hosting a copy of The Pirate Bay in it's cache available for all UK users (http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.thepiratebay.se). Which makes you wonder why they don't ban Google and other search engines. That aside...
I think this would be an interesting experiment - if The Pirate Bay put direct torrent links in their meta descriptions, they would likely start appearing in Google.
That would then essentially make Google == The Pirate Bay. As all The Pirate Bay does anyway is host the torrent links and no actual content.
What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> By "torrent link" you mean the actual content of the magnet hash?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to admit I forgot they put they switched over to magnet entirely (I'm not actually that bigger torrent user).

But yeah same effect - although links may need to be shortened - it wouldn't be hard to knock up a quick redirect service to make nice friendly short urls.

They would then have extra space for number of seeders, leeches and any other descriptive info.

*edited title

<comment><USER2> But if you don't have access to the site, why would it even help to have a different link? If the pirate bay is blocked, you still can't download the file.

<comment><USER3> You don't have to download anything. A magnet link is not connected to a file on the server.

<comment><USER2> _But yeah same effect - although links may need to be shortened - it wouldn't be hard to knock up a quick redirect service to make nice friendly short urls._

This is the part I don't understand. How does having a URL help?

<comment><USER3> hmm..maybe he thinks about a third party service to shorten the urls. I don't see an advantage in shorting urls, but IMHO the idea with magnet links inside google is great..</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fon has decided to open our WiFi network in Japan to all for free - <AUTHOR> http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/general/fon-has-decided-to-open-our-wifi-network-in-japan-to-all-for-free.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+martinvarsavsky%2Fenglish+%28Martin+Varsavsky+%7C+English%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Major kudos if they are as wide spread as they sound. I was able to talk with family in Japan using Skype even though their cells were out... so this will definitely help people.

<comment><USER3> That's truly amazing, and it's not just a nice thing to do but it's great PR.

My best wishes to your family.

On a tangentially related note, are their hotspots in Japan 802.11n?

<comment><USER4> _are their hotspots in Japan 802.11n?_

Most of them probably aren't. Fonera only has one product that supports 802.11n <http://wiki.fon.com/wiki/Fonera_2.0n>

<comment><USER3> Very interesting! I wonder how long the adoption will take.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me that another way for fellow Japanese to help their compatriots would be to remove the passwords on their wireless networks and rename the SSID to "Free Wi-Fi for those who need it".

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER6> Fon is still alive? Looks like 99% of all German FON APs are gone but still listed on their website…

Maybe they are Big in Japan.

<comment><USER7> They are pretty big in japan. I've noticed a big increase in the past year or so; a lot of places that previously offered their own free service now have a for-pay Fon access point. (in the Kobe area, anyway)</comment></comment>


Browser diversity starts with us - <AUTHOR> http://www.zeldman.com/2018/12/07/browser-diversity-starts-with-us/ <comment><USER2> We lost some diversity when Microsoft decided to adopt chromium[1].

I assume, though, that Google will eventually make some change that Microsoft doesn't want, and they'll be forced to fork chromium.

The recent proposals from Google[2] that hobble ad blockers and extensions like tampermonkey might even be enough.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18125238/microsoft- chrome...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18125238/microsoft-chrome- browser-windows-10-edge-chromium)

[2] [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome- extens...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-extension- manifest-v3-may-break-ublock-origin-content-blocker/)

<comment><USER3> > I assume, though, that Google will eventually make some change that > Microsoft doesn't want, and they'll be forced to fork chromium.

This assumes that Microsoft still has a browser _engine_ division by then. I suspect that adopting Chromium was largely a cost-cutting measure and this division is on the chopping block already.

<comment><USER4> They're implementing some features in Chromium, so they still have that division.

<comment><USER3> Well, I know one-person teams who implement individual features in a browser. Maintaining a fork, on the other hand, takes a much larger team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently replaced chrome on every company computer for Firefox. We shared a google account with passwords that everyone needed. But some fools that don't understand their actions properly start deleting password by accident as the cleared the browsing history. Yes I know you have options when you clear history.

In Firefox passwords and browsing history / data is separated. So they can delete browsing history and they don't accidentally delete the passwords anymore. And with a Firefox account all our passwords that employees need are synced safely.

In one day 150 employees changed to Firefox :D

<comment><USER6> >We shared a google account with passwords that everyone needed.

I am speechless.

<comment><USER7> I'm intrigued by the `needed` in there. Why would that ever be a necessity?

<comment><USER2> There's mundane stuff, like letting a small group of people log into Gmail for firstname.lastname@example.com

There's ways around that, but for some orgs, it would be unneeded overkill, and not protecting anything notable.

<comment><USER7> > but for some orgs, it would be unneeded overkill, and not protecting > anything notable.

I can honenstly not think of a single venture where "support@" is not one of the most critical resources wrt privacy and security. On top of that, "support@" is typically the account that has a high churn rate. Where people move on and new people are hired. Of all the cases, I'd say that "support@" ranks amongst the top for need of proper account management.

That said, it's dead simple to grant jane@ and john@ access to an inbox in Google. Researching how to do this may take 30+ minutes. But getting it configured afterwards is really a two minute job.

The only reason I've came across why people shared Google accounts was "we have a business domain and we need to pay for every extra seat". Which is a valid excuse. I'd argue that its not a good enough excuse to lower your security for, but valid nontheless. For one, 2fa is almost impossible when sharing accounts.

Which is why having a "pay per seat" model for any SAAS is perpendicular to having proper security practices. You are not rewarding good security, but rather punishing it by letting organisations with proper separation of accounts pay more then the ones that choose to have as few as possible.

<comment><USER2> I've seen functionality where one gmail account can send an email so that it appears to be from another email address.

I haven't seen anything that allows a seamless view of the inbox/outbox, and a way of sending that doesn't accidentally use their normal email address if they forget to click a drop down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How about downloading and installing Firefox and seeing if it meets your needs? I totally understand if it doesn't, and then you should keep using chrome or safari or whatever, but I am a back end web dev and Firefox (+ edge) meet all my desktop needs.

Give it a try, you might like it.

And that'll have a lot more impact than testing cross browser regularly.

<comment><USER9> At my work I only work in Firefox, another Dev only works in Chrome, etc. By each developer only working in one browser all the time we get pretty good cross browser testing. This has led me to only using Firefox at home too since it works really really well.

<comment><USER10> Same here. When I joined my current team, I was told I should use Chrome, because nobody really tested the site on Firefox, so there may be some breakage. That made me double-down on Firefox use, just so that I could report if any problem actually occurs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Chromium will be the web's de facto rendering engine

I think Blink is the rendering engine. Chromium is Chrome without Google branding

I think that the problem with Firefox right now is that it does not have something unique to offer. Before moving to the new plugin model, there were plugins that were not available on Chrome which was available for Firefox : DownThemAll, Tab wheel scroll etc. But in their desire to chase Chrome they threw it away.

I also seem to have an annoying bug in mobile where after a while long tap on link no longer opens the contextual menu. I wonder if I should report it since last time I reported a defect it turned out to be a problem with uBlock and this one takes a while to reproduce.

I think it might be a good idea for Mozilla to invest in good extensibility. It helped them a lot last time and is therefore a battle hardened tactic

<comment><USER10> > _I also seem to have an annoying bug in mobile where after a while long tap > on link no longer opens the contextual menu._

I encountered a bug matching this description on my S7. So far I discovered that it's correlated to the number of tabs open; around 70 tabs, the context menu appears after perceptible delay, which increases with the number of open tabs. I think I reached something around 90 tabs before I couldn't long-tap on links any more. Closing tabs makes the problem go away.

I'd say "go ahead and report it", but I too have uBlock installed, so I can't say if it's unrelated. uBlock was the very reason I switched to Firefox on Android anyway.

<comment><USER12> > I also seem to have an annoying bug in mobile where after a while long tap > on link no longer opens the contextual menu

I thought I was the only one. I don't have uBlock installed, but also don't really bother reporting bugs because mobile Firefox doesn't appear like a supported project to me at all (where can I find ANY documentation?).

It happens to me occasionally, but I can't say anything about my number of open tabs because it just displays "∞" (wtf man?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Stop using Google Spyware Browser. Google has abused its market position for a long time now, and we are seeing the impact. Forced browser logins, and now proposed deprecation of Ad Blocking API's are the two that bother me the most. The Fox is cool again, Mozilla has your back.

<comment><USER14> >Mozilla has your back

That's kinda funny when you consider where Mozilla came from... the ashes of a thing called Netscape... who tried to rule the world while a couple grad students were busy plugging away at Stanford, doing it the right way.

<comment><USER15> Okay, please state the supposed crimes of the ashes of Netscape because I think a lot of people here aren't following your line of reasoning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You guys can do whatever you want to "diversify" internet browsers, but the writings on the wall. Not only is the majority using Chrome, but all minorities other than Firefox are now derivatives of Chromium. The average tech illiterate consumer isn't going to say "You know what, this isn't right! We can't let Google take control as the dominant layout engine!". They want something relevant that performs well, and Firefox hasn't been relevant in years. Stop wasting your time and drop it. You're ancient browser will crumble just like Netscape, IE, and Mosaic.

<comment><USER17> This critique amounts to "it's not working so give up". Thankfully minorities in the past haven't always been so hopeless.

Every vote counts.

<comment><USER16> Yes but this isn't an election, it's a choice of software. Regular people do not care enough about internet browser dominance. Software projects like these are largely supported by the size of their user space and corporate backing. Your voice will never be heard.

<comment><USER17> Much like voting in politics our usage does add up. If a significant portion of users abandon a browser then the producers will notice.

It's only hopeless if we all agree to do nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use Edge and ( seriously ) all you guys did was mock me for it.

</comment><comment><USER19> What's the best way to port a puppeteer-based suite to one that uses Firefox?

Is there an npm package that will include up-to-date versions of all components without further environment setup or use of external services?

Ideally, with great support for taking snapshots and running headless or headed in simple fashion?

<comment><USER20> [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/tree/master/experi...](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/tree/master/experimental/puppeteer- firefox)

<comment><USER19> I use this now, and love the ease of installation and api. If it's up to developers to use Firefox it'd be great to port our test suites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been a happy Conkeror user for years. Recent changes to Firefox seem to have broken it, so I'm sticking with the older version for now. Chrome/IE/Edge/Safari/etc. aren't FOSS so I don't touch them.

Firefox and Chromium are getting increasingly slow and bloated, plus their chrome takes up a bunch of screen space, doesn't follow the system theme particularly well, and they rely far too much on the mouse (there are extensions which help, but they're still not particularly good).

Out of the two I would still recommend Firefox over Chromium, since Mozilla seem more ethical than Google, contribute less bloat and churn to Web APIs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you insist on using Chrome but back this cause, set your user agent to Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER23> You gotta be the change you want to see. Stop using Chrome/Chromium/Opera/Brave/etc/etc. Stop using Firefox. Start using forks.

</comment><comment><USER24> This rings true with me. I _want_ to use Firefox and ditch chrome, but until it gets less laggy on macOS, I don't think I have a choice. I do use safari for day to day browsing and move to chrome only for development.

Multiple successful browsers is a good thing for the web. I hope that doesn't just die away.

</comment><comment><USER25> I agree with the post, but it should be noted that there's a _big_ difference between Chromium -- an open source project -- and IE 6 being the de-facto browser engine on the web.

<comment><USER26> I think the difference is mostly theoretical. Consider the proposed extension changes: no one seems to like them, but Google will be able to push them through anyways. Maintaining a Chromium fork is a huge undertaking that only a few companies would be willing to invest in.

<comment><USER27> Maintaining a fork is much less of an undertaking, than reimplementing all Chromium quirks. Hence plenty of Chromium forks exist, but only one last barely competing browser.

<comment><USER28> No nontrivial Chromium forks exist, to my knowledge. Do you know of any?

<comment><USER27> I don't think Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Yandex browser are trivial by any measure. Heck, even something small and independent, like ungoogled-chromium, is in no way trivial.

<comment><USER3> I haven't checked, but it was my understanding that – outside of the UX – these are all very shallow forks.

Does anyone know more about this?

<comment><USER28> Yes, these are all very shallow forks that mostly "just" change UI. That guy doesn't understand what nontrivial means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I never ever used chrome: I used Opera, and after Opera 12 I am using Firefox. What am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER30> This could be a huge opportunity. We have a web monoculture now. It's only going to get increasingly so over the next few years. Google will let the platform stagnate, as it has little to no reason to compete. It's time to come up with something better. Something designed for both documents and applications.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any starting point?

<comment><USER30> Maybe something similar to what we have now, but exposes much lower level aspects of the browser and gives you more fine grained control over it. WASM is a good starting point in that it lets you use whatever language you want. Now, we need a browser API that will let us draw directly to the window if we want to. I think a lot could be accomplished by creating the UI portions of a site programatically then dumping the content into a "renderMarkdown()" function.

That's just my idea, though. Hopefully, the current sad state of the web and the coming browser monoculture will spur others to experiment too. I know some gaming companies have experimented with the distributing and executing of x64 binary executables using the browser. I know others are looking into ways to chop up and do progressive loading on binary executables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> lol, no one complains when apple shoves webkit down your throat or google does the same with mobile chrome. the battle has already been lost mostly-who uses mobile firefox really?

on play store, by installs firefox - 100million+,chrome - 1billion+. firefox is great but it's awkward focus on freedom over usability has led to it's downfall imo

<comment><USER32> It's obviously a matter of money, politics, and things beyond my imagination but I can't understand why Firefox didn't double down on Servo (and friends) for mobiles.

At one point there was talk about Samsung being a partner and Firefox/Servo becoming the default browser on the Samsung phones. Which would make a perfect sense, since every non-Apple phone gets its performance from multi-core SoC, and Firefox would be the only browser taking advantage of that. Now, after Google getting their hands slapped by the UE regulators, this Samsung/Firefox marriage could be even more fruitful. And yet, the Servo team got assigned to some pointless VR experiments, and it turned out Android was never a priority. Again: I can't understand why, oh, why.

<comment><USER33> Servo was a test bed, a place to experiment with new technologies on a minimalist browser. The successful underlying technology was/is being moved into Firefox (desktop and mobile).

There's also a new (I think?) mobile browser in progress. I'm not sure how it fits into the larger picture and information is a bit scarce, they just started releasing beta builds.</comment></comment></comment>


Inc. 500 Companines Giving Up Corporate Blogging - Study - <AUTHOR> http://digitizor.com/2012/01/31/inc-corporate-blog/

<comment><USER2> ... and good riddance. Corporate blogs and social media initiatives are so forced and stilted when performed by companies that aren't a natural fit for them.

I remember some of the Sun Microsystem employee blogs were particularly dry, and Oracle sure as hell can't do it (here's a blog on their "sexy" Agile PLM product, [http://blogs.oracle.com/PLM/entry/video_20_customer_results_...](http://blogs.oracle.com/PLM/entry/video_20_customer_results_in) ). Efforts to work facebook and linkedIn invariably end up being a dull one- sided public relations blurb tarted up superficially as a "discussion."

Every once in a while a clueless employee might attempt to respond with a witty remark or sycophantic question and the resulting silence just makes you cringe. But mostly it is just a sad "comments[0]".

This stuff only works for a subset of corporations that have mass public appeal like media outlets/programs, or the entertainment or consumer industries.</comment>


SaaS Pricing Strategy: The 10x Rule - <AUTHOR> http://sixteenventures.com/saas-pricing-strategy <comment><USER2> I agree that the pricing for B2B apps should be "a no brainer" for your customers. Although sometimes it's hard to quantify (put into dollars) the value you provide. Maybe you just remove frustration, without saving much time or money. I wrote an article the other day about all the paid services I use and how little correlation there is between the amount I pay for each and the value I get: [http://www.manuelflara.com/thoughts-on-pricing-for- developer...](http://www.manuelflara.com/thoughts-on-pricing-for-developers/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Apologies for the blatant plug but for anyone interested, I also just wrote about another SaaS pricing strategy yesterday here: [http://technicalmarketing.io/cro/saas-pricing-technique- deco...](http://technicalmarketing.io/cro/saas-pricing-technique-decoy- effect/) I figured it might be helpful for some people here.

<comment><USER4> It's pretty impressive the Decoy Effect practically doubled choice selection. Thank you for this.

Two questions:

(1) would trying this with products that don't include anything physical alter the effect?

(2) how ethical is it to use the Decoy Effect?

<comment><USER5> Decoy is unnecessarily pejorative here. This is known as price anchoring. Anchoring is an influence tactic based on human psychological bias.

I am not really sure why ethics would come into this discussion. Do ethics come into picture when you are considering/selecting databases or programming languages?

edit: rephrased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The key message is not the 10x rule, it's quantifying the value you create for your user. Further, the supporting message is to actively price anchor against that value.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very well put, which is why it is extremely important for startups to actually figure out the value which they can create for their customers.

This is easy said than done though, depending upon what business you do.

Normally, I like to test pretty much everything (start with 10x, compare with 9x/11x maybe) but when it comes to prices, I personally feel A/B testing them is a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER8> can someone help me understand this? does it mean to simply charge 10x the cost, thus 10x the margin?

does a metered pricing fall into value? meaning if someone generates 1000 reports should it cost them 100 dollars? what if it's an all or nothing situation. the value comes from when they receive most of the 1000 and no value when it falls lower than 300? does a metered pricing make sense in this case or does a monthly subscription makes sense?

<comment><USER7> It's not 10x the cost. To make it simpler, what you charge is 1/10th the value which you create for your user.

So if your user benefits by making an additional $100 by using your product, you charge him $10.

<comment><USER8> what if the value differs for each user? a user might find generating 10000 reports will save them $60 while another user generating 1000 reports will save them $100? what if they don't know how reports they generate will save them any money at all or claim so?

<comment><USER9> Doesn't that mean that the second user is in a niche that will pay more for the service? Could there be a different way to charge, so that people are paying according to the value to them (instead of the # of reports, which may be your metric, but apparently may not be really relevant to value)

<comment><USER8> yes! I highly suspect that is the case. It seems like the number of reports is not important but the user's ROI goal from the collection of reports is where the value is.

So in this scenario, say you don't know what the end user is planning to do with the collection of reports and that the user themselves might not have a clear idea of ROI until the report is in their hands and they are able to extract some value from it. Simply having more of it does not necessarily guarantee value but rather what they do afterwards that determine the value of the reports and the quality of the reports (which they choose the data source).

Does this make sense? Basically the issue I'm raising is, what if you can't predict a positive ROI from the reports generated by the user of your software until their intentions with the report is known and after they take action?

...but someone will argue the act of generating the reports automatically and the volume of reports generated IS the value. This argument also has merit because if they were to hire someone to do this, it would cost them X amount of money and using software saves them X amount of dollar and time. The quality of the data source they chose to generate the reports is outside of the software's control.

Maybe I'm just overthinking this...but it does seem like metered billing makes sense because in order to generate the same number of reports, it would cost time and money. If somebody determines that they can do it better and faster and cheaper but still wants to use the software and not pay for even 1/10 of the cost of hiring someone to do it, then maybe they are a niche to not pay attention to. Maybe there's no money in that niche, and it should be ignored altogether. Perhaps even targeting this niche that is resistant to paying for even 1/10 of the cost of generating reports without the software should not play a factor in pricing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How an Outdated Network Could Make Two-Factor SMS Worthless - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a28255/ss7-hack-sms-two-factor/ <comment><USER2> This information is well over a year old

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/nist_is_no_lo...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/nist_is_no_long.html)</comment>


Show HN: Composable Analytics - <AUTHOR> https://companalytics.ids.ll.mit.edu

<comment><USER2> Leads to a login page. Can you link to a description?</comment>


Indexing Billions of Text Vectors - <AUTHOR> https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-07/indexing-billions-of-text-vectors.html <comment><USER3> I love this and the previous two posts!

This is extremely pertinent to me as I have written my own "semantic search engine" and extractive summarizer using word vectors and it is available here:

[https://www.nlpsearch.io](https://www.nlpsearch.io)

So far, it's using a 100D glove model (very simple and not all that good compared to BERT et al) for performance reasons and because I'm hosting it for free with AWS

A much more fleshed out version of my extractive summarizer with a CLI (supporting all major language models like GPT-2) is also available here:

[https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8](https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8)

I love reading about how 0x65.dev is dealing with issues I've ran into. Trying to index large numbers of text vectors is a headache for me, and at the moment that I saw this, I was writing code to get the popular approximate nearest neighbors library "Annoy" to work with my research engine.

As far as the issues that other HN users noted ("Isn't average pooling not that great?) the answer is "Yeah we know but there's literally nothing better". They authors mentioned using a weighted average of vectors, which I assume is being weighted using tf-idf over the word vectors. I've read several papers which say that doing this is not necessarily better than traditional averaging. I've found some success with concatenating average and max and min pooled vectors together before cosine similarity searches - but it's certainly not a good fix and is much slower for not a lot of gain

If anyone is a total nerd about word/document vectors and wants to chat / brainstorm about applying text vectors to search / extractive summarization - please contact me! I'm desperate to work with others on this problem!

<comment><USER4> I tried weighted average, but in my case the weights were computed by doing dot product between all vectors in the phrase (m x m), then taking the average over rows for each word and normalising. Kind of like a poor man's Transformer. It will boost words that are supported by other similar words in the same phrase.

<comment><USER3> Can you provide psudocode or code for this?

I'd post a snippet of my implementation but I'm too dumb to figure out the format.

But wow this is much better for results! Now to figure out how to make it fast!

<comment><USER4> Something like this, including thresholding for pairs of words that have low dot product:

        import numpy as np

        def inner_product_rank(vecs, threshold=0.5):
            sims_mat = np.dot(vecs, vecs.transpose())
            sims_mat = sims_mat - <USER2>
            sims_mat[sims_mat<0] = 0
            ranks = np.sum(sims_mat, axis=0)
            return ranks

Then you can take a weighted sum of the vecs or use the ranks to select the most related words. It is also possible to run spectral clustering on sims_mat to get the main topics of the text, it works quite well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does each of those 200 dimensions represent/encode?

This is a very interesting and pragmatic design. I tried a couple of queries and the results were great for most of them, but not so much for esoteric ones, or for queries involving names, which makes sense according to the implementation specifics outlined in their blog posts.

I never heard of this company before, and I am very interested in IR technologies( [https://github.com/phaistos- networks/Trinity](https://github.com/phaistos-networks/Trinity) ). I am glad they are trying and it looks like they have a chance for something great there.

Ahrefs.com is also working on a large scale web search engine, but other than their CEO announcing it on Twitter, there hasn't been any other update since.

<comment><USER6> By default, there's no attempt to connect a particular semantic meaning with a particular dimension - it's worth noting that all the popular methods of calculating word vectors can/will give results that can differ by an arbitrary linear transformation, so in the event that they contain a very particular "semantic bit", it's still likely to be "smeared" across all 200 dimensions - you could have a linear (unambigious, reversible) transformation to a _different_ 200-dimension space where that particular factor is isolated in a separate dimension, but you would have to explicitly try and do that.

So the default situation is that each individual dimension means "nothing and everything"; if you had some specific factors which you know beforehand and that you want to determine, then you could calculate a transformation to project all the vectors to a different vector-space where #1 means thing A, #2 means thing B, etc - for example, there some nice experiments with 'face' vectors that can separate out age/masculinity/hair length/happiness/etc out of the initial vectors coming out of some image analysis neural network with an unclear meaning of each separate dimension.

<comment><USER7> Even without a priori semantic goals, I think you can also transform/rotate your dimensions to maximize their interpretability.

Simplified example: if your two-dimensional system gives you two points:

        -0.5, 0.5
        0.5, 0.5

Then you losslessly rotate to

        0, 1.0
        1.0, 0

With the idea that the latter is simpler for humans to assign semantics to

<comment><USER8> This is the idea behind non-negative matrix formulation (NMF). As the name implies, it forces the entries of the embedding matrices (for both the reduced document and term matrix) to be nonnegative, which results in a more interpretable "sum of parts" representation. You can really see the difference (compared to LSA/SVD/PCA, which does not have this constraint) when it's applied to images of faces. Also, NMF has been shown to be equivalent to word2vec. The classic paper is here: [http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~blei/fogm/2019F/readings/LeeSeun...](http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~blei/fogm/2019F/readings/LeeSeung1999.pdf)

PS—There should be a negative sign on the (2,2) entry of the first matrix.

<comment><USER9> > non-negative matrix formulation (NMF)

*factorization ;)

Also PCA follows a similar idea as well (I mean, rotating vectors), but it's usually done is a much lower dimensional space

<comment><USER8> Ugh, that one was auto-correct, I swear. I have no idea what's going on at Apple's NLP department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm really curious about the trade-off between memory usage and latency. Can the work be parallelized, or does it mean you now need 5x+ the number of servers for the same amount of traffic? That would quickly counter (thought not entirely) the reduced memory requirements.

<comment><USER11> Hi, I am one of the authors of this post.

As you mention, it is a trade-off. In this case we are trying to balance CPU and memory usage. First of all, if you just use the original vectors (or the quantized ones mentioned in the post), it might very well be the case that there is no server where you can even place the index.

So let us consider the example in the post and that we have a server with enough memory. We put the index (1 TB) in RAM and assume that one request takes 1-2 ms. Then a single CPU core can handle 500-1000 requests per second. So now we are using _a lot_ of RAM and very little CPU. Depending on your use case, this can very well be better than what is proposed in the post, but for some it might be preferable to use servers with more balanced resources.

And just to clarify, the memory is shared between CPUs. So you pay the memory price once and you can then scale it to all the CPUs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice read!

I'm curious as to what settings you used for product quantization, and the general setup that you tried. I find that there can generally be a smooth quality degradation from raw float32, to float16, through 8/6/4 bit scalar quantization, to product quantization down to a very small number of bits per vector if tuned properly. The quantization method is independent of the search method used (brute force, cell probe with inverted lists (IVF), cell probe with IMI inverted lists, HNSW), though both affect quality of results.

FYI, the Faiss library (used across Facebook and Instagram) has a CPU HNSW index implementation as well, with a GPU one possibly to come at some point.

Generally we do not use HNSW for our largest indices due to the memory overheads and restrictions on vector removal, but HNSW is useful as a top- level index for inverted list searching on these large indices (an index sitting on top of sub-indices), and indeed is possibly required for the largest indices, e.g. [https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/wiki/Indexing-1T-v...](https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/wiki/Indexing-1T-vectors)

<comment><USER11> Hi, I am one of the authors of the post.

We tried using LOPQ, but I don't know the exact parameters used. We probably did not put enough effort into it, though.

Your approach seems interesting. Maybe we will try something similar in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> hmm...this 4 Billion queries number comes from where?

Looking at Stackexchange most of the sites have less than a million (possible?) queries(questions). Stackoverflow, probably the largest, has 18 million questions. Wikipedia article count is about 5 million.

Is the assumption that people are coming up with 1000 different ways to query every possible result endpoint?

<comment><USER11> Hi, I am one of the authors of this post.

The number 4 billion is made-up. It was chosen in order to illustrate the scale of the problem we are trying to solve. And it also happens to be just below the maximum number possible to store in an unsigned 4 byte integer. This is of course beneficial when trying to build an index with a small footprint. With more queries, we would have to consider using long integers (8 bytes) or some custom type with e.g. 5 bytes.

If you're interested in where the queries come from, you might find these previous posts interesting: [https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-05/a-new-search- engine.html](https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-05/a-new-search-engine.html) [https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-06/building-a-search-engine- fr...](https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-06/building-a-search-engine-from- scratch.html)

<comment><USER14> A thought regarding the 4 byte vs 8byte. Both of those will be highly optimizable by custom/manual vector instructions, like the modern AVX512 vector instructions. Likely someone on your team thought of that or does that but in the off chance you haven't looked into it yet it might prove very useful!

Thanks for the posts, they're fascinating and the idea of more alternative search engines would be great. Best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very nice and useful set of articles. Makes for good reading. Kudos

</comment><comment><USER16> What do you use this similar search for? Is it for data on what previous users clicked on?

</comment><comment><USER17> Lots of blog posts since their launch. 7 pretty in-depth blog posts in 7 days since Dec 1st.

<comment><USER18> They're gaming the system by producing intellectually stimulating quality material aimed at the hackernews demographic!

<comment><USER19> As the average HN consumer, I can get behind this.

<comment><USER17> hm damn, where's the median HN consumer when you need them?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Autonomous cars witho human drivers will be allowed on Cali roads starting in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/11/16458850/self-driving-car-california-dmv-regulations <comment><USER2> This does not excite me. Honestly, it amounts to another dummy I have to look out for while driving.

I appreciate the tech and do look forward to a day when it's widely implemented but I'm not near convinced it's ready and lives are on the line here. "Insurance" can't fix that problem.

But... I don't live in California anymore so I can still easily avoid them :D</comment>


A Magical Time to Start a Movement - <AUTHOR> http://dennybritz.com/blog/2013/10/23/a-magical-time-to-start-a-movement/ <comment><USER2> >Hotels and taxi companies fear the sharing economy, Airbnb, Uber and Lyft.

I thought the sharing economy was bittorrent and Free Software. Aren't AirBnB, Uber, and Lyft part of the home piecework subcontractor temp-for-life economy?

</comment><comment><USER3> "The government ... disrupted by a group of people building something on their laptops in Silicon Valley."

Right below this quote from your blog, in the "From around the web" section: "Obamacare could soon cause massive layoffs."

I think it's a magical time to get people wasting time on their phones, maybe solve some minor efficiency problems around the edges of Obamacare but SV is the worst possible choice to solve the big problems we're facing.

<comment><USER4> I haven't read OP's piece yet, but I agree with @dennybritz that there are plenty of us here in SV who care about solving the big problems.

For example we just launched Prime, an iPhone app that allows you to download your medical record from any doctor and share health activity with friends and family. [http://stayinyourprime.com](http://stayinyourprime.com). We're not the only ones in healthcare. There's also Practice Fusion, drchrono, DoctorBase, and countless others.

And on the education side there's Inkling, for example. And on the banking side there's Simple (though they're actually based in Portland). And of course YC famously backed Watsi. Maybe you have different examples in mind of what big problems are but it does seem to me that as we are seeing more startups overall that means we're seeing more startups addressing bigger/more meaningful problems.

<comment><USER5> > an iPhone app that allows you to download your medical record from any > doctor and share health activity with friends and family

I mean no offense to you personally, but I fail to understand how this problem fits in a world in which 2.5 billion people lack basic sanitation.

<comment><USER6> >I mean no offense to you personally, but I fail to understand how this problem fits in a world in which 2.5 billion people lack basic sanitation.

some of the people making big on some app will become the next Musk (though unfortunately some will become the next Thiel) and will work on the big problems our civilization faces. That is is the beauty of SV - it allows people doing business here (or even merely employed) to generate resources to try to tackle something bigger. It is like springboard.

<comment><USER7> Let's be honest: how many Thiels per Musk do we get? Somehow I fail to see the beauty in this alleged springboard.

<comment><USER6> the beauty here that it sometimes produces a Musk at all. Nothing else does it. The closest we'd got is Gates - while not SV geographically, it is the same approach - make money in hi-tech and apply it to solve a big problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Government more or less created Silicon Valley (government subsidies, guaranteed government contracts, direct government investment), yet it is now "powerless"? If anything, Silicon Valley is a great example of the power of government.

Silicon Valley has yet to solve any of the big problems in the world; poverty, healthcare, climate change.

The idea that there's no war going on the world, or that you don't need universities is complete nonsense.

For sure some things are changing, but that's always been the case. This blog post, and the bizarre idea that everything must be "disrupted" (nobody knows exactly what that means) is a perfect example of the insular, ignorant, and shallow attitudes that pervade Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER6> >The idea that there's no war going on the world, or that you don't need universities is complete nonsense.

...

> the insular, ignorant, and shallow attitudes that pervade Silicon Valley

these ideas and attitudes pervade only very young or very rich heads. It is also natural that such heads are the most vocal ones, especially when they are both - very young and very rich - at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >We build things, convince people to use them, and fight the status quo

How the status quo would fight the status quo?

Paraphrasing what a wise man once said:

How can a kingdom divided against itself survive?

The people behind all these cool new projects are the same people from the old industries, if thats not the reality in the beginning that soon will change as long its a profitable business.. the status quo may not be in the seed phase, or even in the initial funding, but definetly will be a part of it on the IPO.. and thats how even the cool projects end to serve the status quo..

The only way to really fight the status quo, the establishment is decentralizing profits and power.. otherwise, its always the same story, since the beginning of the civilization

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice try, but I think this is a little bit _too_ obvious to really work as a parody of Silicon Valley vacuousness.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is magical thinking. The reality is that established players will use their positions to buy out, advertise out and just generally squeeze out any threats to their business.

<comment><USER12> Bell and IBM show that this does not always work. MS may be the next example in ~10 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >With MOOCs we no longer need universities to educate people.

I am not convinced of this. I think MOOCs are great and certainly a game changer for domains like computer science. But there's lots of domains that I know nothing about that I am not convinced I could master via an online course (e.g., biotech or anything else that requires expensive equipment).

Even where MOOCs are the best answer, isn't the best provider of a MOOC going to be a university? Maybe just what we think of as a university will change.

<comment><USER14> A MOOC is a scalable replacement for a traditional class lecture. It's not intended to replace labs or hands-on experience, nor the value of being immersed into a campus, mixing with students and teachers...

That being said, MOOCs can help alleviate a lot of the cost of a University degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a magical time to have been born in a western country, but then that's been true for a while now.

By "every individual wields great power" you probably mean those with access to technology, relative peace, and education. War hasn't gone away we just don't fight them at home anymore.

<comment><USER12> Quality of life is up just about everywhere else as well over the last several decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yeah, We'll learn how governments magically turned the 90s internet dream of anarchistic freedom into Big Brother. And how network analysis, in real time, can instantly identify the core members of any "movement", and if "inappropriate" quickly stomp on them.

</comment><comment><USER17> The tech side is great. The wages side... not so great.

Also, it's not a "sharing economy" when people are selling things.

</comment><comment><USER18> ...keep telling yourself that.

<comment><USER19> Flagged because condescension is not an argument nor is it constructive.

<comment><USER18> Fair enough. Yes there is massive disruption and potential for more, but it's a fallacy to think that power lies in the hands of individuals.

The myth that "...a single person can build something on his or her laptop, instantly reach billions of people, and create a movement if he can convince others to believe in the idea." just helps concentrate power into the entities with the most processing power. Who's networks are needed to reach all those people?

Jaron Lanier puts it a bit more eloquently than I do: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/fixing- the-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/fixing-the-digital- economy.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Returning to School in Mid-30s? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN... I am considering a career change into cybersecurity and would appreciate any guidance and insight those of you who are in the industry might be willing to offer.
I'm a mid-30s attorney living in south-central U.S.  I currently represent large corporate clients in the healthcare field.  I have a Bachelor's degree in Business Admin and a J.D. from a state university.
I am considering returning to school to pursue a career in cybersecurity.  It has been a field I have been heavily interested in since I was a child.  I have attempted to keep up with the evolution of cybersecurity throughout the years, maintaining general knowledge concerning current tools-of-the-trade, etc. However, I am admittedly a script-kiddie (I have spent far more time attempting to read/interpret code than write it) when it comes to being hands-on. I can complete the easy hackthebox challenges but typically have trouble with more difficult stuff.
So, I am contemplating returning to school to pursue what I often feel is my true calling.  I admit that my primary concern is that I will be significantly lagging behind most others in the field who have held jobs in cybersecurity since their early 20s.
I also wonder how important it is to graduate from a top-tier school.  When it comes to lawyers, graduating from anything but an Ivy league practically guarantees you will never be presented with top-tier employment opportunities in any large city. Does the same apply to cybersecurity?  If so, to what extent?
I wonder whether the skills I've developed over the past 8 years practicing law might be beneficial in the cyber arena.
Finally, I wonder whether my love for this stuff would soon fade after it became "work."  Have any of you experienced this?
I would love to hear thoughts any of you might have regarding the above.  Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Going back to an onsite college for it doesn't seem like a great idea. It's already a field that doesn't really value credentials in general, especially academic ones. You could probably instead do a tour of the commercial certifications while paying for it with the law salary, and come out equivalently-or-more employable and with much less debt.

Not an expert, just sharing intuitions.

I think there are probably some subreddits that would get this question often and have in-depth suggestions.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you feel that the No. and Quality of submissions dropped? - <AUTHOR>

Ever since comments points went invisible, less and less quality articles seems to be making HN. And I definitely find myself visiting HN less and less.<p>Is it the same case with you? <comment><USER2> HN does seem to be getting more mainstream and less techy articles voted up.

But this was a trend that started long before comment scores went invisible, and has nothing to do with them.

It's just a consequence of attracting a larger audience.</comment>


Nokia Agrees to Buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6B - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/04/14/nokia-agrees-to-buy-alcatel-lucent-for-16-6-billion/

<comment><USER2> Essentially this means that Nokia won't get back into consumer hardware for a good while. The mapping division (Here) will probably be sold soon.

The mobile networks business is now the primary driver at the company. They'll have their hands full trying to integrate the Alcatel-Lucent networks business with their existing assets. (Remember that Nokia's networks business today is already the result of a merger with Siemens and a purchase of Motorola's networks division, so they have some experience with that.)

Nokia is now a formidable competitor to Ericsson and Huawei, but it won't be on Samsung's or Apple's radar again.

I know that Nokia does license the Nokia brand to Foxconn for Android tablets sold in the Chinese market... But that's not a sign of life in Nokia's consumer ambitions any more than it is for other brand licensors like Kodak or Polaroid.

<comment><USER3> I just hope whoever buys HERE doesn't screw it up. At the moment I do like them more than the google maps. They are also cheaper when it comes to licenses.

<comment><USER2> I think Samsung will pick up Here. Seems like a bargain for them.

Samsung has been slowly building up their own "shadow stack" for mobile. They have everything from the OS up, but map data is a huge missing piece.

Also, I think Samsung's homegrown Tizen OS has some ambitions on the automobile side, and that's a market where Here has been doing well.

<comment><USER3> I've heard rumours Samsung is already using HERE heavily internally. So it would make sense- but what will happen to the other that are currently using it to (they've mentioned Microsoft, BMW etc. in the article).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> HERE engineer here (yes, I also sometimes hate the noticeable amount of redundancy of our corporate brand). One important point that analysts haven't stressed enough while evaluating potential buyers, is the role our top customers play in all this dance.

By top customers I'm referring to car manufacturers in particular. They are the ones who are paying/will pay top dollar for our connected car offerings. A sale to a single car manufacturer would make the rest go away. A sale to Google, for example, would completely destroy our trust – these guys _hate_ Google. A sale to Uber... Same thing.

Facebook, maybe? They've been known for respecting independence of acquired companies to a high degree. That could be one of our best shots IMO.

<comment><USER5> Is it perceived as a given that Nokia's going to dump HERE? I used to be with the Point & Find group, which is what became City Lens -- my impression is that they were working on a quasi-secret project all last year, some kind of outdoor adventure thing, but I noticed last month that just about everyone I'd worked with changed their LinkedIn status to things no longer associated with Nokia/HERE.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that was canned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't really understand how this works. Microsoft bought Nokia for about $7B[1] and now Nokia pays more than twice that amount for Alcatel? Where is this money coming from and why is Alcatel worth so much more?

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-closes-nokia- acquis...](http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-closes-nokia- acquisition-2014-4?IR=T)

<comment><USER8> Don't forget that Microsoft('s lackey) took care of lowering their value as much as possible before buying the Devices and Services unit for some spare change.

<comment><USER9> Come on. Nokia was doing a fine job of lowering the value of their handset business on their own.

<comment><USER2> Yeah. It wasn't Elop who created one of the most dysfunctional software development units ever. He was brought in when the damage of previous bad management was just becoming fully apparent.

Nokia in 2007-2010 was spending many times more than Apple on R&D. For that money, they got multiple infighting operating system teams each developing their own half-baked thing (Symbian, MeeGo, Qt, S40) and device teams that were building uncompetitive devices on top of 3-year-old software.

<comment><USER10> Two words: burning platform.

[http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/06/the- fin...](http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/06/the-final- reckoning-of-burning-platforms-memo-damaged-nokia-by-wiping-out-13b-in- revenues-and-destro.html)

There was just no reason to write a memo like that. It destroyed their business, almost singlehandedly, and no, I'm not exaggerating. The consequences of that memo were insane: Nokia's handset sales died all over the world all at once.

<comment><USER2> We don't have more than quarter-level visibility. All we know is that Q1 2011 sales crashed and Elop wrote his memo. Which is the cause and which the consequence?

In Q4 2010, Nokia stuffed the channel with outdated products. In a market that was growing accustomed to iPhone and Android, Nokia tried to sell consumers products based on the first touch edition of Symbian S60 -- the same software that was considered outdated when it first shipped in Nokia 5800 years earlier. (Because of the way Nokia's product development pipeline worked, the mid-range phones they released in late 2010 contained software that was several years old.)

Isn't it possible that Nokia's Q1 2011 sales crashed simply because the channel was full of Symbian phones that just were not selling? As CEO, Elop would have visibility into that when he wrote his infamous memo.

A point against the "evil memo destroyed sales" theory is that purchasers at large operators don't turn on a dime. When they stopped buying Nokia's phones in Q1 2011, the decision was already made earlier.

<comment><USER10> The fallout from that memo was instantaneous and widespread. I worked in wireless at the time and everyone I knew at all of the carriers began to pull Nokia inventory. This was not true in many markets.

Even if the burning platform concept was correct, releasing it in a companywide email instead of strategically shifting the company and then announcing the change in a measured, considered fashion would've been much better for their cash flows.

Purchasers at large operators don't turn on a dime, usually, but I would argue that the CEO of a handset manufacturer declaring their entire existing lineup of products is going to be discontinued in viscerally graphic terms is one of the things that might spur such quick change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nokia recently auctioned off literal tons of engineering equipment. Looks like they closed a huge engineering facility in Oulu, Finland. A lot of it looked like obsolete stuff (like for a big product line sustaining-engineering group). I don't know enough about cellular to say whether or how much of the stuff was really useful for new product development; but some of the equipment looked very recent. The only thing that I inferred at the time was that T&M resellers are going to have a better year than Rhode & Schwarz.

[http://www.equipnet.com/auctions/exceptional-offering-of- com...](http://www.equipnet.com/auctions/exceptional-offering-of- communication-testers%2c-analyzers%2c-oscilloscopes%2c-ge/656/)

<comment><USER12> That looks like equipment from Nokia's handset division ramping down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was an under graduate engineer at Nortel Networks in the late nineties and early nougties writing code and building rigs to automate the testing of OC192 tx / rx components before they were assembled and usually dropped under the ocean.

I was amazed at the capabilities of this hardware and the next generation from both Nortel and its competitors,like Lucent.

It amazes me what is achievable but not viable for mass production. Or desirable by customers (good enough).

An industry that matters so much. With no backbone there is no network in so many places. Perhaps a few mergers will unlock the doors?

</comment><comment><USER14> Valued less than WhatsApp!

<comment><USER15> Don't forget that in 2013 Microsoft bought Nokia's handset division for half of the price Nokia is paying now for Alcatel-Lucent.

<comment><USER16> I'd argue that the networks business is and always has had more long term value than handsets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So it's Nokia-Siemens-Alcatel-Lucent? A powerhouse!

<comment><USER18> Siemens is still Siemens, and Nokia bought Siemens's shares in NSN (renaming it Nokia Networks) in 2013.

<comment><USER19> Yes, they're still going down the drain

It's a company that has no speed to compete in the modern world

See what divisions they closed/sold off in the past years

Can't say I'm sorry

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So basically now Nokia, Erisson, Huawei or ZTE ( Are there any others ) actually build and run the Network Backend of Mobile Network, while Mobile / Cell Operators does the sales, marketing and customer services?

<comment><USER21> There are.

Cisco and others are getting into the small cell space.

Not that many people realize that Samsung are in to building base stations.

Cisco have always been in the back haul, core mobile routing space, along with Juniper, and some others smaller players.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So Nokia owns Bell Labs now? What a world we live in.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is interesting, and probably good. These are two companies that make sense to consolidate, especially as both eye developing markets in SE Asia & Africa, and _especially_ those markets that are open to Chinese development monies+influence (mostly in Africa).

On the integration side of things, yes, it will probably be a little challenging from a business systems & personnel point of view if they really want to become a single-faced corporation, but on the manufacturing & engineering side I think it'll be pretty easy. I don't know if my company is the largest EMS partner for either one, but I do know that both Nokia (otherwise referred to as NSN, Nokia-Siemens Networks) and ALU are both top-10 customers of ours, and collectively responsible for a couple billion in revenue. I mention this not because of anything to do with my company, but because both are already setup for effective automated integration with their EMS partners, so whatever they do on their side (e.g. changes to EDI rules/structure, ECO processes, NPI processes, etc) will be pretty easy to trickle down and deal with on our side.

My hope is that Nokia become the business leader part of this acquisition, not Alcatel-Lucent. They are very challenging to work with sometimes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious to know what this means for a potential Palm revival now, given this: [http://www.webosnation.com/its-confirmed-tcl-bringing- back-p...](http://www.webosnation.com/its-confirmed-tcl-bringing-back-palm)

<comment><USER24> Very likely nothing at all. Isn't TCL just an Alcatel brand licensee? So it's not connected to Alcatel-Lucent in other ways than the name.

edit: question mark

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I'm sure you're right, it seems TCL is a separate company based in China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Plan 9 changes hands

<comment><USER26> Plan 9 was licensed under the GPLv2 last year: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/14/plan_9_moves_to_gnu_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/14/plan_9_moves_to_gnu_space/)

<comment><USER27> Lucent still holds the copyright, regardless of which licenses they apply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sounds like Nokia is looking for a way to prepare itself to enter the market with new products. Good news for Europeans for sure, since Nokia was the company that usually managed to translate products to European realities.

<comment><USER29> I don't think this has any positive implications for a potential new Nokia handset business. It is, however, possibly bad news for Ericsson and Huawei.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's possible that the French government's approval of the deal is a dim glimmer of deregulation:

[http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/38b9dbf6-e2bd-11e4-bf4b-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/38b9dbf6-e2bd-11e4-bf4b-00144feab7de.html#axzz3XNGZS6SG)

As tangents go this is an important one. Structural issues are strangling European growth and employment. Reform in France alone would make a big difference, and help pave the way for truly screwed up economies like Italy and Spain.

</comment><comment><USER31> For me this can be seen as a symptom of the problem with technology companies today: If you're too small you won't be able to survive. So everyone gets bought so that they don't die.

In the end you have a few big companies splitting up the market under themselves and the hurdles for a market entry are too high.

An even better example for this are semiconductor foundries.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder what this means for Alcatel-Lucent here in Ottawa. I briefly worked there in 2001 right after Alcatel bought out Newbridge. There is a strong networking division there designing some of those large backbone "routers".

</comment><comment><USER33> Beginning of the end of Nokia Networks. Looks like they dont have any clue what to do. ALU enodeb is crap, Nokia ancient Flexi is crap and their new stuff will be crap if they will manage to sell this to somebody :-)

</comment><comment><USER34> Alcatel is one of the main companies that sells FirefoxOS phones here in México. I wonder if it is the same in other countries. And I wonder if this will affect FirefoxOS in the long run? Will they switch to Windows?

<comment><USER35> Alcatel is not in the phone handset business anymore -- it is just the name that is being used by other manufacturers (perhaps TCL).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Alcatel bought Lucent .. Microsoft bought Nokia .. now Nokia bought Alcatel- Lucent .. All mixed up

</comment><comment><USER37> Only two major mobile telecom equipment manufacturers left. Great news for Huawei !

</comment><comment><USER38> That was quick... there there rumors just last week...

<comment><USER39> Rumors typically only become public as the deal is closing, and more people are brought in to do the work on it. The fact that there were rumors was a strong indication that the deal was about to take place.

<comment><USER40> Not quite, Apple was rumored to be buying Tesla, which would have made sense considering thier cash reserves, however the deal never happened.

<comment><USER41> Apple rumors are not a typical example. There's a whole industry of idiots "analysts" who do nothing but release click-bait speculation about Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> More patent trolling coming?

</comment><comment><USER43> It looks like a merger deal to me with Nokia having the upper hand than an acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER44> Patents. That's what this has to be about.

Produce little to nothing and just sue for royalties on other manufacturers.

<comment><USER5> I think you -- and others who haven't checked, which is understandable -- imagine that after Nokia sold their handset business to Microsoft, nothing was left but a tiny little husk. If that were true, your assumption would probably be correct, but it isn't. Nokia ended 2014 with over 60,000 employees worldwide and nearly €13B in revenue. They're still a _really big_ company. Sure, they make some money from patent licensing -- as do all companies of that size -- but the vast majority of their revenue comes from network equipment and services.</comment></comment>


The Perfect Django Settings File - <AUTHOR> http://blog.damonjablons.com/2009/10/15/the-perfect-django-settings-file/

<comment><USER2> This is far from perfect.

Using old style DATABASE settings. Questions article's up to dateness and author's knowledge.

Importing local_settings into settings like that means it's hard for local settings to add to the various lists e.g. installed apps, middleware. It's far more flexible to import a base_settings.py into settings.py (which is the local settings file).

OA's templete thing is (if I understood it correctly) total fail. Learn about django.template.loaders.app_directories.Loader

Debug status based on domain name is not scalable, prone to error and annoying (I often need to switch debug on/off in dev/staging/production(pre-launch))

<comment><USER3> I agree with some of your comments, but to be fair this was posted in October 2009, so it's almost one year old. If I'm not mistaken, the new dictionary- style DATABASES setting is from 1.2, which only came out this year.

Not sure I agree about your comment regrading settings. It's quite easy to amend values from the main settings instead of overwriting them, you just do e.g. from settings import INSTALLED_APPS, then INSTALLED_APPS += ( ... ).

That said, I've found the approach to settings outline here: [http://blog.zacharyvoase.com/2010/02/03/django-project- conve...](http://blog.zacharyvoase.com/2010/02/03/django-project-conventions/) to be quite intriguing and have been meaning to investigate it and possibly start using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good writeup.

One small thing I do differently: in my dev machines, I'll set and export DJANGO_DEBUG in the environment. Then in settings.py:

      import os
      DEBUG = 'DJANGO_DEBUG' in os.environ

This doesn't hardcode a single hostname in checked-in code, and works well across different machines and developers.

</comment><comment><USER5> _if socket.gethostname() == 'your.domain.com': DEBUG = False_

No.

The default setting should be False, and set True only for dev.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yikes! _if socket.gethostname() == 'your.domain.com': DEBUG = False_ ? This is just bad advice.

I prefer to be explicit in the settings for each environment, and create a settings package, with the following modules:

\- common

\- development

\- staging

\- production

Then in each of the _non-common_ modules import the common variables, and set your DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE depending on the environment. virtualenv makes this particularly easy.

Here's a writeup by Zachary Voase, who I've had the pleasure of working with more than once:

[http://blog.zacharyvoase.com/2010/02/03/django-project- conve...](http://blog.zacharyvoase.com/2010/02/03/django-project-conventions/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is how I do my debug, seems a little more compact :)

       DEBUG = socket.gethostname() != 'your.domain.com'

I'd also suggest you add

       ADMINS = (
           ('name', 'firstname.lastname@example.com'),
       )

and

        # Email-settings
        SERVER_EMAIL = 'firstname.lastname@example.com'
        if DEBUG:
          EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'
        else:
          EMAIL_HOST = 'localhost'
          EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'

So you get notified of any errors via e-mail when debug is off.

</comment><comment><USER8> I go for having a settings module which imports different things depending on what's available. For example, you can define host-specific settings based on hostname for different production servers (or production, staging, QA, etc), or just a 'local.py' for development. Regardless of what's imported, that file starts with "from base import *" which is where the main settings are.

For the curious, since everyone has their own way of doing this, my new- project init script is here: <http://github.com/tvon/gig>

</comment><comment><USER9> I prefer using a separate settings_local.py, which overrides certain settings like DEBUG and the like. Then each environment can easily have its own settings_local file, excluded from code versioning.

</comment><comment><USER10> one thing that I do a little differently is the template dirs

I just do a standard

        TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
            os.path.join(
                PROJECT_ROOT,
                "templates",
            ),
        )

for the template dirs and the I symlink in template directorys of apps in the project. This allows me to do any additional template wackiness(like adding another directory in the path outside the project) with a symlink rather then modifying the settings file

</comment><comment><USER11> You should be able to throw a key-value store on top of settings to override certain values at runtime. Replace django.conf with django_dynconf?

</comment><comment><USER12> I feel much better with the signals you have raised. But I think if you have many effects on settings you will lose the bright property of Django. Everything should start from the simplest things.</comment>


Obama's Nuclear Power Breakthrough - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703787304575075413484405770.html?mod=djkeyword#articleTabs%3Darticle

<comment><USER2> This is the law of unintended consequences at work.

1\. Green groups spend countless hours and dollars fighting nuclear power plants during the 1970's and 1980's. They mostly win, and nuclear plant construction stops. 2\. Green groups spend countless hours and dollars promoting the global warming theory, and the need to reduce carbon emissions during the 1990s and 2000s. Ironically, the best technical solution to this problem is Nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power plant construction starts up again, as a direct result of the green campaigning against global warming.

</comment><comment><USER3> BreakthePaywall! is a free add-on for Internet Explorer (Firefox coming soon!) that simplifies using the various methods for circumventing website paywall restrictions. <http://www.breakthepaywall.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> When did wall street journal get a pay wall?

<comment><USER5> A google referrer url gets around it.

[http://www.google.com/search?q=Obamas+Nuclear+Power+Breakthr...](http://www.google.com/search?q=Obamas+Nuclear+Power+Breakthrough)</comment></comment>