CNIL imposes a financial penalty of 50M euros against Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnil.fr/en/cnils-restricted-committee-imposes-financial-penalty-50-million-euros-against-google-llc <comment><USER4> 50M euros seems far too little to me. It's a major violation against a fundamental regulation in their core product and compared to their revenue, 50M is nothing. A magnitude more will probably get google thinking, but I doubt this will.

<comment><USER5> As always with these cynical comments about fines, it misunderstands the nature of them. Google or any other company does not get to just continue their practices as usual, the fine is purely "punishment" for the bad behavior in the past. The real teeth is in the changes they will be forced to make.

The EC's three antitrust cases against Google don't end with the billions of dollars in fines they have to pay. Google would gladly pay them if it meant they could continue their anti-competitive practices, it would just be a cost of doing business. But that's not the point of them.

<comment><USER4> but wouldn't a fine that's actually sizable send a different signal?

I don't get how google can violate somthing like this and the only results is the enforecement of existing law and some fine? Or I am not getting something?

<comment><USER6> > the only results is the enforcement of existing law and some fine?

The job of European data protection agencies isn't to be punitive, but to ensure compliance.

If the issue was tiny, an honest mistake that was promptly fixed when it was brought to the offender's attention, and they show that they implement safeguards so that something like that won't happen again, there may be no fine at all.

Compared to this, EUR 50M is rather heavy handed, but given that Google has approximately $infinity at their disposal, no value would "ensure compliance".

What this does is ensure that the topic will be discussed by the board of directors (50M is probably beyond the discretionary spending budget of the not-quite-top level manager who handled this) with the outlook that there may be more fines like that.

OTOH it's still far from that "4% of global revenue" figure, so it gives room for escalation. Hopefully it's also small enough that it won't be disfigured too much into "the evil EU is being protectionist again!" US press cycle that comes up every time a US company is fined by some EU body.

<comment><USER7> > The job of European data protection agencies isn't to be punitive, but to > ensure compliance.

Wouldn't larger fines ensure compliance though?

<comment><USER8> Well next fine, if nothing is done to comply, will be heavier. For better or worse, that's how it is intended to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> CNIL forces bad UX pattern on EU users.

The correct pattern would be to use reasonable default settings and allow more advanced users to customize.

But EU wants to force Google to present advanced configuration options to all users. For vast majority of users advanced configuration options look like mumbo-jumbo, so most users will learn to quickly accept whatever mumbo-jumbo they are presented with -- without reading it at all.

That CNIL change will make the Web worse than it is now, not better.

<comment><USER10> That is entirely by design?

If you collect so much diverse data that you exploit in 100 different ways and share with 1000 different companies that you require a hundred pages of individual consent checkboxes, the system is working as intended.

Will most users just accept all? Maybe. But I think the share of concerned users is larger than you believe it to be. And if history is any indication, "reasonable default settings" have a bad habit of never erring on the side of data collection minimization, particularly for new and novel features.

<comment><USER11> It should be a requirement that the hassle is proportional to the data sharing. Want to share my data with 100 different places? Make me click 100 checkboxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find it fascinating that Google gets a 50M fine for not having the exact UX experience France thinks they should have but then fines a French company 250K for breach of actual user data. Makes sense.

<comment><USER13> GDPR fines are intended to generally be proportional to the company's revenue.

<comment><USER14> Furthermore, this is the first fine falling under GDPR. The previous fines handed out by the CNIL were pre-GDRP, with much lower maximum amounts (300 k€). So a 250k€ fine is close to the maximum they could fine, which makes sense given the offense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is how you weaponize legislation. I 'll be damned if "They are going after the big guys". Just reading the ruling tells you that any DPA can come up with any kind of justification if they have a beef against you. Not only the law is vague, now they can fine our businesses because we have "buttons and links on which it is required to click to access complementary information". And this is only the DPA of France. There are much more corrupt governments and officials across EU countries. Romania is already having some fun with it. Good luck to everyone , but i m expecting this to backfire spectacularly in the medium term.

</comment><comment><USER16> Although 50M EUR is a minor fine for a corporation the size of Google, this goes beyond a "warning in writing in cases of first and non-intentional non- compliance". Does this mean that Google has been previously given such a warning and violated it, or that they've been judged to have intentionally not complied?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google Translate link (of the irony):

[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=h...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnil.fr%2Ffr%2Fla- formation-restreinte-de-la-cnil-prononce-une-sanction-de-50-millions-deuros- lencontre-de-la)

And the full decision (in french, too) for anyone wanting to read 31 pages of scanned legalese (not too harsh, though): [https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/san-2019...](https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/san-2019-001_21-01-2019.pdf)

<comment><USER17> Official announce in english: [https://www.cnil.fr/en/cnils-restricted- committee-imposes-fi...](https://www.cnil.fr/en/cnils-restricted-committee- imposes-financial-penalty-50-million-euros-against-google-llc)

<comment><USER18> That translation is only marginally better than the automatic Google Translate translation.

<comment><USER19> The CNIL has a very constrained budget (since the need for them keep increasing, and their income doesn't), so spending money for an english translation is probably not very high on their list. I would not be surprised if it's one of their regular employee that just happened to speak english that do those.

<comment><USER20> > I would not be surprised if it's one of their regular employee that just > happened to speak english that do those.

For very low values of "speak english", of course - this is France after all. That translation is so peculiar, it reminds me of the Chinglish manuals we get with cheap manufactured products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is an interesting case. So France is essentially arguing that not only should opt-in be visible (as they mention it is on Google's create account page), but that configuration should be immediately visible as well. This will screw over much more than google should it be upheld.

It's interesting that this wasn't brought up to my employer in sweden. We had default data collection settings checked and in a separate view accessible by a similar "more options" toggle and it was deemed okay as long as we had a visible blanket opt-in checkbox and a link explaining the settings, how we use data, and how to adjust. Our regulators said it would be enough as the goal of GDPR is to make every use of data reasonably known, adjustable, and revokation with good faith toward the user. Yet here it seems France is arguing that it is about immediate showing of all settings to the user and that every website should tell in the user's face about every single configuration of data usage. It's possibly a good approach, idk, I feel it is a bit too annoying of a precedent and that they are nitpicking a bit.

I can't wait for this to fully play out. Regarding documentation and informing the user, I disagree with their findings entirely about the frustration of finding data usage info as all of Frances concerns were lost on me upon visiting [https://safety.google/privacy/data/](https://safety.google/privacy/data/). To me it seems that google has made a good faith effort at least in documentation.

<comment><USER22> I agree that this would put basically any service in existence into non- compliance.

As a user, I do agree that a "blanket opt in" button/ default checked checkbox is so pointless that it could as well be left out.

A EASILY DIGESTIBLE page explaining what data is stored and how it is used , with an agree button at the end (and separate opt-in for different sets of data/functionality) should be mandatory.

Emphasis on the easily digestible, because we all know that the "terms and contions" pages out there are constructed to be as obtuse and uninformative as possible to make users just skip them.

<comment><USER23> Honestly at most 10% of the sites that I have seen allow you to opt-out with a single click, whereas basically all of them allow you to out-in. Some don't allow you to browse the site without accepting.

We need some general browser based auto script, so that websites don't get to ask, something like a do not track header, but one that was legally binding.

Until then I click accept on all the sites that I use on my phone, they can set all the cookies they want, as I use Firefox Sync, which erase all data whenever you press back or close the browser.

<comment><USER24> I use a firefor add-on[1], which works for the Quantcast banners (adds a "I refuse" button), but would definitely like something that works equally well for all websites, or that websites fix it themselves. Maybe even better, if they could simply follow the DNT flag, or not track their users in the first place.

I worry that accepting cookies once, for one of these sites, will lead them to try and de-anonymize you, maybe even across private browsing windows, or different sessions. If you give them the right to basically fingerprint you, be assured that they will abuse it.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> These fines are really just a way for European govts to claw back money which they feel they are owed by American tech companies for being successful in European markets. In a global world, that's a wrong way to look at things. It is time to cut admin fat in EU govts and stop penalizing productive businesses.

</comment><comment><USER26> The top of the CNIL site literally says:

> If you continue to browse this website, you accept third-party cookies used > to offer you videos, social sharing buttons, contents from social platforms.

That looks like an illegal opt out. They should fine themselves :)

<comment><USER27> If you look just to the right of that statement, there's a button labeled Personalize that lets you set which 3rd party services you consent to. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that appears compliant...

<comment><USER28> Why can't we just set a single setting and have every website obey it?

<comment><USER29> It's called Do-Not-Track and was ignored...

<comment><USER30> If GDPR required websites to obey DNT would it still be ignored?

<comment><USER31> GDPR requires active consent (or so I have repeatedly seen on HN), and that was clearly ignored

<comment><USER30> Yeah, very true. :\

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does this mean that the consent Google has already obtained from users is invalid, and so they must request consent again in a GDPR-compliant manner?

<comment><USER33> No, consents given BEFORE GDPR are considered valid. But, new google accounts are created everyday... and this apply to them

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you read the part about consent given during account creation ?

<comment><USER33> Sorry for being unclear:

\- for Google accounts created and Android smartphone configured before GDPR (25/5/2018), consent is considered valid under GDPR

\- for Android smartphone configured AFTER 25/5/2018, the consent is considered invalid, whatever the Android version or the time that the phone is sitting on the shelf, or whether the Google account already exist or not.

\- moreover the consent is invalid for the Google account creation during the android smartphone configuration

Google is fined "only" for what happen AFTER the GDPR (25/5/2018): android configuration and account creation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Between the GPDR imposing costs on the advertising model and Google being pressured not to go into China, its more pressure on the top line of earnings.

<comment><USER9> Google would be fine, because Google's competitors (especially small ones) would suffer more than Google itself.

However EU users would suffer from GDPR fallout:

\- Less services (due to lack of competition).

\- Annoying cookies/privacy questions, force by GDPR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hope they go after one of the "cookiebot"-type splash sites next. What I mean is those that only have "consent" or "leave".

It's a clear violation of the GDPR and yet tons of sites do it.

<comment><USER35> Will going after those sites actually accomplish much?

They'll just add a third option, "pay", which lets you buy access without them storing personal information (other than information they need to recognize paid users, of course). Almost no one will actually pick the "pay" option, so for most practical purposes it effectively reduces to either "consent" or "leave".

<comment><USER11> I'd be perfectly happy to see what effectively is 3 optionsn "pay with money" "pay with info" or "leave". Whether or not people choose the same option anyway doesn't matter, it's now a much more informed choice than before as it's obvious how much your information is actually worth.

Also, sites that can't be bothered to set up premium/paid access mihgt do go the LA Times route and block access in Europe which I also think is completely OK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> 50M EUR seems like a rounding error. Isn't Google earning over 30Bn USD per quarter?

<comment><USER37> Not if it's just profit from europe

<comment><USER36> Even then, if you assume Europe is somewhere between a 4th and a 3rd of their total revenue - which I'd expect it to be, given how the EU is a larger economy than the US and Google is even more dominant in Europe than in the US, and irrespective of ad budgets being traditionally lower than in the US - <USER2> seems tiny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is exceedingly petty even considering that the GDPR as a whole is a tool to subject US tech firms to a degree of scrutiny and control that would suffocate other industries and extract the occasional payout.

No one benefits from this, they just get shitty UX.

</comment><comment><USER39> Its ironic that cnil has "accept all" as the default choice for 3rd party cookies on its site

<comment><USER19> Honestly, I think what they offer might be the best solution you can hope for: one button "I don't care", one button personalize and in it one button "disable all". People who don't care and just want the site to work aren't lost, people who care aren't lost, people who want to personnalize aren't lost. If you care, it's two click total to disable everything, and it's very easy to find (the bright right "deny").

Should they have "refuse all" along with "accept all" ? Yes.

Should "refuse all" be the default and thus features be disabled ? I'm not entirely sure (see what they list in the personnalize, it's youtube videos and twitter cards ...).

In terms of the intent of the law (give control to the user and make it easy to opt out), I would say they are doing fine. As opposed to all those shitty websites where you can't find how to disable, or you have to disable a bazillion things by hand.

<comment><USER40> Refuse all needs to be the default, because that is the law. Even when it comes to the intent of the law (which is to give control to the user and also not make lazy users "accidentally" give up all of their right to privacy) they are not doing fine. They're doing better than their peers, who have made even more malicious choice dialogs.

<comment><USER19> I agree as a matter of "how is the law written now", I was talking more of a "how I hope as a user that it could/will be".

If we go with everything off by default by law and try to apply it, we will end up with a broken web, meaning websites will not follow the law because it makes a stupid and not be punished for it because it's become the norm, just like the (bad) cookie law.

I'm ok with how it is on their site (based on how easy it is to disable, myself I disable all on such sites); it's quick with only 2 clics total, and it's easy to figure out with a clear color scheme and wording.

It's important to understand we make the law not for us tech users, but for everyone. Finding a solution that works for everyone and gives them what they want is important.

<comment><USER41> Why would we end up with a broken web?

Remember that consent is only needed if you can't rely on one of the other conditions for storing that data. If you are, say, selling a product, there's no need to ask for consent at all for using the customer's data to bill them and ship it. If the user changes some setting in your site, there's no need to ask for consent to store that preference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> gamma-male I really hate that if I start looking for bdsm stuff on Amazon I start having bdsm related ads everywhere. It's really uncomfortable when friends are shoulder surfing.

<comment><USER42> Just have 2 amazon accounts, SFW version and NSFW version

<comment><USER43> I guess that's why firefox containers are for, just don't forget to name it 'vintage-math-books'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> English version: [https://www.cnil.fr/en/cnils-restricted-committee-imposes- fi...](https://www.cnil.fr/en/cnils-restricted-committee-imposes-financial- penalty-50-million-euros-against-google-llc)

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not surprised by this. It's pretty clear that having a pre-ticked checkbox is not allowed under GDPR. It's also against the intent of the law to require 6 clicks to deny consent but only 1 click to grant it.

<comment><USER21> What's not allowed is pre-checked opt-in. As France mentioned that's not the case for google. Only a default configuration is pre-checked. The opt-in is a separate immediately seen checkbox saying you agree to data usage for personalization etc. Along with a link explaining how to adjust.

Edit: I should say that this approach was deemed acceptable by Swedens dataskyddsmyndighet which is the government regulatory agency and is a common approach in many sites.

<comment><USER32> Perhaps I misunderstood and was relying too much on my memory of the Google UI when I was in the UK. Is there a youtube video or series of screenshots showing exactly how to grant or deny consent with Google?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> As an European: <3 <3 <3

Also:

 _" This is the first time that the CNIL applies the new sanction limits provided by the GDPR."_

I'm super happy the law is hopefully finally starting to get some teeth. I sincerely hope it gets successfully tested in court, and that lawyers will smell money in slamming down on companies trying to blatantly fake their way out of GDPR by cheating users into "accepting" the pre-GDPR status quo.

<comment><USER15> As a european i disagree. This is not a good ruling for anyone who has their business in europe. It reads petty and kinda-insane. And i just don't get the "suck it americans" kool-aid that the whole of the EU is into atm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Google made $32.32 billion in Q4 2018.

That's $384.76 million per _day_.

Fines this small accomplish nothing.

<comment><USER47> But the fine increases with non compliance up to 4% of their yearly revenue

<comment><USER46> Well then that's good, because this may as well be a verbal warning

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "OK Google" ;-) Facebook, Amazon... please stay in line!!! :-D

I saw so many website, big or small, implementing the GDPR the easy way and call it a day... without any thinking or consideration for their users... that now everybody may gonna think twice ?

Google was an example, a message. That's why CNIL chose such a big player 1) it's to big to be really hurt by the fine 2) most other business - a lot smaller - will be frightened and will re-think their slacking approach It's a way to say "don't mess with us".

The funniest part is that usually the US administration try to help US business in such case. But I don't think that Trump administration - <USER3> during shutdown - will...

<comment><USER48> > That's why CNIL chose such a big player

FWIW, CNIL didn't _choose_ a big player. They're responding to complaints advanced by the two associations mentioned in TFA, that is _La Quadrature du Net_ and _None Of Your Business_.

<comment><USER49> What?

Of course they chose. They have received the same complaints about literally thousands of companies, and chose to advance these two first.

Regulators (no matter where) always make strategic decisions about who to prosecute and when. That's part of the job.

I'm not sure why we are trying to pretend they are robotic automatons who just process complaints exactly as received.

<comment><USER50> In interviews back before GDPR, the CNIL stated that, when the maximum fines allowed weren't enough, they saw the PR embarrassment of making their rulings public, which is not required, an even higher punishment for Google. So they have been making strategic decisions for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The EU is bringing a copyright law in soon, who knew the EU would be the one bringing down the internet

</comment><comment><USER52> For Google, this is small. Remember when they had to pay US$500M to the US DOJ for knowingly assisting in pushing drugs?[1]

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker- sting/](https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/)

</comment><comment><USER53> > On 25 and 28 May 2018, the National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) > received group complaints from the associations None Of Your Business > ("NOYB") and La Quadrature du Net ("LQDN").

As corporations become greedier, people more privacy-aware, and leaked data more abused by criminals, I think it's only a matter of time before Max Schrems (guy behind noyb and the fall of EU-US Safe Harbor agreement) is named Time's Person of the Year.

</comment><comment><USER9> > the economic model of the company is partly based on the ads > personalization. Therefore, it is of its utmost responsibility to comply > with the obligations on the matter.

"Therefore" reasoning works in the opposite direction than CNIL bureaucrats claim.

If Google is known for ads personalization, then:

1) Users who decided using Google services should imply that Google will try to personalize their ads by default.

2) In order to "comply with obligation" to deliver ads personalization, Google should turn on "ads personalization" by default.

<comment><USER54> > If Google is known for ads personalization...

If you ask 100 random people what is Google for, how many people do you think will answer "ads personalization"? My prediction is "close to 0%".

Google's "About" page states: "Our mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". No mention of personalization involved.

Therefore, Google is NOT known for ads personalization.

<comment><USER9> A correct question to "100 random people" would be "Does Google do ads personalization".

My guess is that 70 people would not even know what "ads personalization" is.

Out of remaining 30 people, 28 would correctly claim that Google does ads personalization.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's announcement and a typographic nigthmare - <AUTHOR> http://asselinpaul.calepin.co/apples-announcement-and-a-typographic-nigthmare.html

<comment><USER2> "nigthmare"? Is that the typographic nightmare?</comment>


Bonsai Hosted ElasticSearch Is Down - <AUTHOR> http://status.bonsai.io

<comment><USER2> How were they 0wned? Lack of MFA, rogue API key, or something else? Are full- access accounts being handed out willy-nilly instead of IAM accounts?

AWS Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA):

[http://aws.amazon.com/iam/details/mfa/](http://aws.amazon.com/iam/details/mfa/)

AWS Identity Access and Management (IAM):

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/IAMBestPract...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/IAMBestPractices.html)

Managing your AWS API Keys:

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSG...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSGettingStartedGuide/AWSCredentials.html)

Go a step further with your AWS API keys and use AWS' API access logging (CloudTrail):

[http://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/](http://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/)

Don't get burned. Check your stuff out.

<comment><USER3> At this point, MFA for master AWS accounts should be _mandatory_.

<comment><USER4> MFA for all console accounts is the only right answer. If machines require credentials to do specific task or perform API calls then roles should be used.

<comment><USER3> > If machines require credentials to do specific task or perform API calls > then roles should be used.

Even then, if the data must be considered highly valuable/immutable, then versioning/delete protection should be enabled for the S3 bucket(s) in questions. This requires the MFA token to be _in the API call_ for the delete to succeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Full-blown AWS console compromise - this sounds similar to what happened to Code Spaces ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909791)) Is there a new vulnerability?

<comment><USER6> It wasn't a management console compromise, it was an old API key that got leaked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any word on how those accounts are getting compromised?

Have they been complacent (easy password to guess, keys easy to be compromised (maybe in a public github repo)), or could there be some whole in the AWS secutiy model?

<comment><USER8> If there were a hole in the AWS security model for this, I think it'd be pretty obvious pretty quickly, given what happens when US-East takes a dive...

This happens constantly, and it's almost always through lack of best practices (as mentioned in higher up comment - IAM, MFA, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This brought my app down. [http://jrdevjobs.com](http://jrdevjobs.com). Our shards were all missing from Bonsai. We looped through each model and saved it.

We're back up.

</comment><comment><USER10> AWS needs to improve usability of IAM so that it gets broader adoption. The learning curve is non-trivial.

<comment><USER4> What particular issues have you had with IAM? I find that the wizard is a good starting point for understanding the policies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This sucks... I am happy we just put our search cluster on elasticbeanstalk atm, but I wish we had more services like this running.. good news is new security practices will hop up everywhere because of this.

</comment><comment><USER12> Not to focus on this when they are experiencing downtime, but Bonsai has been one of the least reliable service providers I've ever used.

<comment><USER13> Good that it's pretty easy to change elastic search provider with little downtime. I'd recommend checking out found.no. We've been pleased with performance and stability. Heck - I can't recall any downtime at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> our site [http://www.violetgrey.com](http://www.violetgrey.com) went down because of this. Luckily we were able to reindex pretty fast before their backups kicked in. Any ideas on how to have fallbacks in such cases?</comment>


How I ended up writing a new real-time kernel - <AUTHOR> https://dmitryfrank.com/articles/how_i_ended_up_writing_my_own_kernel <comment><USER2> this is really interesting, thanks for posting</comment>


MeatSpace Chat.. Like Chatroulette for Web Devs - <AUTHOR> https://chat.meatspac.es/

<comment><USER2> Great, so you'll see developer penises instead of ordinary ones?</comment>


How Facebook, Apple and Twitter are ending online equality - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/2960469/social-media/how-facebook-apple-and-twitter-are-ending-online-equality.html <comment><USER2> So this, as usual, is false when it comes to Apple, and that destroys the credibility of the whole piece. Any musician can put their music up on connect.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Great Equalizer indeed...

<comment> norea-armozel Some are more equal than others. ;)</comment></comment>


Whatever Happened to Webmonkey.com? - <AUTHOR> http://longhandpixels.net/blog/2013/sep/20/whatever-happened-to-webmonkey/

<comment><USER2> Using the Hotbot search engine to search through MonkeyJunkies mailing list entries (powered by Majordomo) to find articles teaching Netscape 4 only DHTML JavaScript posted on WebMonkey.

1998 indeed was a different time!

Flash 4 was also really fun to muck about with.

</comment><comment><USER3> Somewhat related: I was a huge fan of Webmonkey. I was also a regular at [http://funkychickens.com](http://funkychickens.com).

They haven't updated it still. Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER4> Web monkey helped me a ton in my younger years. Thanks for all the fish!

</comment><comment><USER5> So long, Webmonkey. Thanks a lot for the "Sizing Up the Browsers" article from 1999.[1] I referred to it every time I made a website that was best viewed in NN4 or IE5 at 800x600 resolution.

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20000302050428/http://hotwired.ly...](http://web.archive.org/web/20000302050428/http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/99/41/index3a.html?tw=design)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is similar to what happened to TheWebMachine which hosted tutorials for Photoshop/illustrator and family and simple HTML and a bit of PHP (anyone remember Shoutboxes?). "Rough around the edges" is acceptable, IMO, if you're doing this for fun. But Wired is a business and without sufficient relevance, they probably thought it wasn't worth the effort to keep it active.

</comment><comment><USER7> I loved this site and the way the articles were written. Thanks to everyone (especially Scott) who contributed to it over the years.

<comment><USER8> You're most welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In case anyone is interested in some really old stuff, I recently dug up some of my articles from 1997 for a Wired/Hotwired reunion. Here's a doc with some pointers to the wayback machine:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mIMWHlxe_SFilR2YTzGCAmlF...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mIMWHlxe_SFilR2YTzGCAmlFHUvIW0-yKmWu5c2PQZM/edit#heading=h.hjrg0pn3ke75)

<comment><USER8> That's awesome. I tried tweaking the URLs to see if I could find some of my first stuff (1999), but no dice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hard to believe they couldn't have made a go of this.

The 'WebMonkey' brand has a decent amount of cred - why doesn't Wired try to transition it into a proven model, like the Envato 'Tuts' sites?

I guess if they've already tried to resurrect it several times (as the article states) and still couldn't pull it off, I must be missing something.

Still, seems a shame...

</comment><comment><USER11> Remember the interview show HotSeat with John McChesney? Ah, the early days of Real Player.

</comment><comment><USER12> Will be missed. Learned how to make my first homepage and how to use Flash 5. Remember this[1]?

1\. [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lAXqRCQ-u9U/Tk64A0f97II/AAAAAAAAAo...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lAXqRCQ-u9U/Tk64A0f97II/AAAAAAAAAoI/LuxwnysQsyY/s1600/macromedia+flash+5.png)</comment>


Clojure from Scratch to GPU: A Simple Neural Network Training API - <AUTHOR> https://dragan.rocks/articles/19/Deep-Learning-in-Clojure-From-Scratch-to-GPU-12-A-Simple-Neural-Network-Training-API <comment><AUTHOR> This series builds everything from matrix operations provided by Neanderthal [1].

If you have any questions about Clojure or numerical computing with Clojure/Java, or if you spot an error in the article, please discuss here.

I will definitively write a book. Please sign up for the newsletter at the bottom of the article if you'd like to be notified.

[https://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal](https://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal)

<comment><USER2> > This series builds everything from matrix operations provided by Neanderthal

Do they perform convolutions as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea for a cliffhanger: Do they perform convolutions as well? Follow the next episodes and watch the movie (the book) to find out!

<comment><USER3> This is like when my 4 year old daughter asked if she'll be able to have dessert and I used to say "maybe if you're lucky..."

She quickly figured out this always meant "yes".

<comment><USER4> That's so adorable</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ex-CIA chief: What Edward Snowden did - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/19/opinion/hayden-snowden-impact/index.html?eref=igoogledmn_topstories

<comment><USER2> A good point at which to stop taking Hayden seriously is where he says:

 _Snowden fled to China with several computers ' worth of data from NSANET, .._

As in, he's trying to plant the idea (and fear) in our minds that Snowden has collaborated with the PRC government in some way. There's no evidence that this is the case, and a lot of evidence (based on how he conducted himself while in HK) that no contact of any such kind occurred.

Yet Hayden is trying to plant the idea in our minds that the main purpose of Snowden's trip was to make contact with the Chinese, in the same way that Benedict Arnold collaborated with the British, or Hanssen or the Rosenbergs did with the Soviets, Ames with the Israelis, etc.

<comment><USER3> His other fundamental assumption was that the NSA wasn't doing anything wrong. Well, lots of people think that it was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bullshit.</comment>


Caffeine Spray, Brought to You by Peter Thiel's College Dropout Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-21/caffeine-spray-brought-to-you-by-peter-thiel-s-college-dropout-challenge#r=hp-ls

<comment><USER2> Homeopathic, indeed. [http://www.unboundmedicine.com/harrietlane/ub/citation/15135...](http://www.unboundmedicine.com/harrietlane/ub/citation/15135208/In_vitro_predictions_of_skin_absorption_of_caffeine_testosterone_and_benzoic_acid:_a_multi_centre_comparison_study_) states about 2 microgram/cm^2/h absorption of caffeine.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine) gives about 100 milligram per cup of coffee.

Assuming 100 cm^2 exposure area, you would need a milligram per cm^2 for a "cup of coffee equivalent". That's 500 hours ("three weeks")

And that is assuming that this spray is equivalent to whatever van de Sandt er al used to get caffeine on the skin (I would guess they applied way more than a spray would apply)

On the other hand, high pressure spraying (better called jet injection; see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_injector](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_injector)) might work. I think that would require FDA approval, though.

<comment><USER3> Everyone that buys this is going to spray it in their mouths. This has nothing to do with skin absorption and everything to do with getting around the FDA.

<comment><USER4> the taste is pretty bad and lingers for a while - why not just get pills?

<comment><USER5> You can also just buy pure caffeine powder and mix it with your favorite drink, or buy capsules seperately and make your own pills. Probably much more cost-effective.

And yes, from personal experience, I can attest to the fact that pure caffeine has an extremely bitter taste.

(Which begs the question, does it taste bitter because it is after all a neurotoxin and we have evolved to find those lacking in taste?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For me, it's really easy to dismiss the product as snakeoil when I hear something like Homeopathic energy being used to promote the product.

<comment><USER7> _He calls it "homeopathic energy" and says they've invested around $50,000 in it so far._

Maybe it's time he gives back the $100,000 and enrolls back in college. For anyone unfamiliar why it's such a red flag that someone voluntarily associates themselves with homepathy:

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

 _Homeopathy is a system of alternative medicine originated in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann, based on his doctrine of similia similibus curentur ( "like cures like"), according to which a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people will cure similar symptoms in sick people. It is widely considered a pseudoscience._

 _The remedies are prepared by repeatedly diluting a chosen substance in alcohol or distilled water, followed by forceful striking on an elastic body, called succussion.[7] Each dilution followed by succussion is said to increase the remedy 's potency. Dilution usually continues well past the point where none of the original substance remains._

Basically, if you have a cold:

1\. Start with a poison that causes cold symptoms

2\. Dilute it with water

3\. Repeat diluting it with water until the most sensitive scientific instruments can no longer detect the original substance

4\. The water then has an "imprint" or "spirit" of the original substance which will cure the cold

<comment><USER8> He's a businessman, not the head of a charity. In 2007, the homeopathic industry did $3.7 billion in sales. It is probably higher now.

On the other hand, if this thing works, it surely does so by placebo, but due to the harmful effects of actual caffeine usage, placebo might actually be a major benefit to the consumer.

<comment><USER9> $3.7 billion in sales is not a lot when you are talking about an industry or market.

Now if you spread the $3.7 billion over the different product options, one option alone is probably not going to bring in a whole bunch of revenue. Afterall, it isn't $3.7 billion for Caffeine sprays only...

If you give them 1/1000 of the total market, that is only $3.7 million in revenue for a company. That isn't what most would consider high potential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> inspector-g _[His] father, who has a Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry and owns his own lab in China, helped develop it._

I love the irony. Peter Thiel was trying to make a point with his "College Dropout Challenge", but this product was really developed by someone with a graduate-level education.

<comment><USER10> It's an inspiring message though;

        Anyone can drop out of school, find a partner,
        and start a business.

I suppose with context it reads a bit differently though;

        Anyone can drop out of Harvard, take a expedition to
        Antarctica, meet a venture capitalist on the boat,
        and use your dad's PhD-level chemistry knowledge and
        infrastructure to start a business selling snake oil to
        gullible people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> >The big idea is to make caffeine palatable to people who get the jitters from coffee and energy drinks. Four sprays, the recommended dose, has less caffeine than a cup of coffee, Yu says.

I guess they've never heard of tea?

<comment><USER12> Tea isn't everyone's cup of .... nevermind

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It sounds like the main benefits from the spray as opposed to coffee / tea are: 1) Cost 2) Convenience.

The spray will cost about $0.38 per dose.

The competition isn't coffee or tea but caffeine pills, which are cheaper and about as convenient. It looks like you can get 120 100 mg pills on Amazon for $5, or $0.04 per dose. I don't see the benefit of a spray as opposed to pills.

<comment><USER7> _It looks like you can get 120 100 mg pills on Amazon for $5, or $0.04 per dose. I don 't see the benefit of a spray as opposed to pills._

You have a good point, but 100 mg is a good dose of caffeine for people that are sensitive to it. They would find themselves cutting the pills down for lesser doses. The 100 mg caffeine pills I bought on Amazon are very tiny and would be very difficult to cut without a specialized device.

<comment><USER10> The specialized device for cutting pills costs about $3 and is available at every single pharmacy on earth. They are generally designed to be used by the elderly and infirm.

<comment><USER7> How small of a pill can they accurately cut? The caffeine pills I got off Amazon are about the size of 2 pinheads and are kind of soft. I don't think they would be easy but I've never used a pill cutter.

<comment><USER10> Some of them are designed for such small pills, those might run a few more dollars. I worked in an inpatient pharmacy for awhile and we regularly cut tiny pills.

They are fairly ingenious for how simple they are, basically you put the pill in a V-shaped compartment so it would settle down to the base of the V. Flip the lid over and a razor blade would apply even pressure and split any size pill perfectly in half.

Some were more amenable than others to the splitting, while some would explode into a chalky mess, but I think that had more to do with the filler than the ingredients, which gives the opportunity to shop around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > "The world's toughest problems aren't going to solve themselves!"

What problem does this solve? Sleep deprivation for people who don't drink soda, tea or coffee?

<comment><USER15> Seriously. All I could think is,this is one of the world's toughest problems?

I get the spirit behind the idea of giving kids money to tinker, but this creates what's equivalent to a programmer who has only learned from stackoverflow and w3schools. There is a lot missing that's still part of the standard college curriculum, and the worlds problems will most likely need just as much theory as practical understanding.

<comment><USER14> Maybe this isn't because the kids were given freedom from school.

Maybe it's because the person funding them came from Stanford.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is sure to be successful. The Indiegogo campaign _already_ went over its limit, with 41 days left to go. Kudo's to young Ben Yu.

I can't help but be reminded of the Caffeine Patch scene from _Meet the Robinsons_ , though.

 _Mr. Willerstein: Dr. Krunklehorn, I know you 're very busy at Inventco Labs. And we're just so happy to have you as a judge.

Lucille Krunklehorn: It's my pleasure, Mr. Willerstein. Hey, you never know, one of your students may invent the next integrated circuit, or microprocessor, or integrated circuit. Oh wait, I said that already. Well, I just don't get out of the lab very much. Is that a bowtie? I like bowties. I haven't slept in eight days!

Mr. Willerstein: Uh, well then, can I get you a cot or something?

Lucille Krunklehorn: Nope, I have the caffeine patch. It's my invention. Each patch is the equivalent of 12 cups of coffee. You can stay up for days with no side effects. AHHH!!! Sorry._

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR4DzHo5hz8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR4DzHo5hz8)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is interesting because it's an end-run around the FDA's current regulations on caffeine intake. Reminds me of when Five-hour Energy claimed they weren't an energy drink but an energy "shot" and shouldn't be held to the same regulations.

<comment><USER18> It's completely uninteresting because it's an end-run around the FDA's regulations on caffeine. Let's just brainstorm all the ways to ingest caffeine, eliminate the ones the FDA has explicit regulatory power over, then target what remains. Unsurprisingly, the FDA will start to take notice if you're obviously trying to sidestep them, and then they'll legislate you out of existence.

Frankly this is really disappointing to me, it seems like Thiel is supporting people who support his libertarian views more than actual visionaries. There are lots of people who would be well served by this program, and this guy doesn't really fit the bill in my opinion. It may as well be the 'Peter Thiel drop out of school to create trouble for regulatory agencies I don't agree with' scholarship.

<comment><USER16> I don't agree with your opinion, but I love your last line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems like a waste of potential. The kid needs to go back to college and make something great.

</comment><comment><USER20> The "How it Works" page looks very clip-art-y to me: [http://sprayable.co/pages/how-it-works/](http://sprayable.co/pages/how-it- works/)

Reinforces the homeopathic points I suppose.</comment>


Apple in talks to improve sound quality of music downloads: Does 24-bit matter? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/22/24.bit.music/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am all for any effort Apple and others make to improve the quality of music downloads, but do enough people care to make this worth the effort commercially?

It seems like some ridiculous number (90%? 99%?) of listener/equipment combinations would get almost no benefit from this change.

What am I missing?</comment>


C++11 Signals and Slots - <AUTHOR> http://simmesimme.github.io/tutorials/2015/09/20/signal-slot <comment><USER2> As the post has close to no content, it might be of some interest to link to an actual working implementation in modern C++ of signals and slots with the observer pattern: libsigc++

[https://github.com/libsigcplusplus/libsigcplusplus](https://github.com/libsigcplusplus/libsigcplusplus)

There's also an article on wikipedia on libsigc++.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libsigc%2B%2B](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libsigc%2B%2B)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks</comment></comment>


Spurning Erdogan's Vision, Turks Leave in Droves, Draining Money and Talent - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/world/europe/turkey-emigration-erdogan.html <comment><USER2> Hopefully he loses power before he's able to commit ethnic cleansing in Kurdish Syria.</comment>


Plans for Vim 7.4 - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/vim_announce/ZWWgK9aXQ2Y/IMObY8lBFm0J

<comment><USER2> I am curious what "add IDE features" means. It seems like a wide-open feature request.

A few things I can think of:

* Better support for background tasks .. :mak, :grep, system(), :! without interrupting editing.

* Fancier errorlist and locationlists. cexpr()/lexpr() really make you fit round pegs into square holes.

* Better omni-completion performance (any completion dialogs other than <C-N>, buffer keyword completion, are unusably slow for my purposes).

* Built-in support for some filesystem operations. NERD_tree/:! can be clunky, and dropping into the shell isn't always ideal.

* Real shell buffer .. I know I'll get my head cut off for this because it is quite emacs-y, but it would be nice to be able to run my shell in a buffer. At the very least, it would be nice to have :sh be a somewhat capable terminal that could handle colors and generally feel like a normal terminal.

I'm excited to see 7.4 because it looks like some real new direction for the project, for better or worse. I'm sad to see VimScript de-emphasized, having invested a good bit of time in getting good with it, but VimScript is pretty slow, so this is good news.

<comment><USER3> >> I'm sad to see VimScript de-emphasized, having invested a good bit of time in getting good with it, but VimScript is pretty slow, so this is good news.

I'm a Vim enthusiast who hasn't tried Emacs, but one thing I've heard that makes me jealous is that they can script their editor using a flavor of Lisp. This is extra awesome for devs whose primary language is already Lisp.

Sometimes I wish for a Vim-like editor with a nicer scripting language, but "Vim-like" is such a huge target at this point that any effort is bound to displease most users by omitting the one tiny feature they personally love.

If Python becomes useful for scripting Vim, that would be awesome in my book.

<comment><USER4> Ive always thought Lua would be a good vim scripting language.

* It's designed to be embedded

* It's easy to expose functionality and API's

* It's fast

* IME if other languages are also embedded, and a thoughtful API/plugin arch is created, functionality from other language plugins can be easily accessed in lua. (I know, bunch of caveats there, but if I'm dreaming...)

<comment><USER5> Vim supports scripting with Lua similar to the support it already has for Python, Perl, Ruby, Racket. Your instance of Vim just has to be compiled with that option. See ':h lua'. One major problem with its support for scripting languages has been that you can't count on other users having a Vim compiled with proper support. This includes Python, although more recently some distributions (e.g., I think, Ubuntu) have had standard Vims where Python support was by default compiled in. Apparently improvements to Python interface in 7.4 will go beyond those currently offered for outside languages, which many find somewhat clunky.

<comment><USER6> 99% of vim scripts still use VimScript.

I think this happens for a few reasons:

      - First, as you pointed out, not every user is guaranteed
        to have your favorite language installed.  But they will
        have VimScript whenever they use vim.

      - Second, even if a user has your favorite language
        installed, the version of vim they have might not be
        compiled with bindings for that language.  Only VimScript
        is guarateed to be compiled in.

      - Third, VimScript is the only language in vim that's not
        crippled in some way in respect to functionality.  All
        the other languages it supports have to rely on
        VimScript itself in order to perform some vim-related
        functions.  In some languages, this makes it so that you
        might as well be using VimScript to begin with.

<comment><USER7> #2 has been the biggest drawback in my experience. It often isn't realistic to compile your editor from scratch, particularly when you are working in a windows environment without administrator rights to your machine. This means that any extensions (e.g. dbext) dependent on those bindings are unavailable.

Is there a reason why there is no portable binary compiled with bindings for perl, python, lua, et cetera?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With the development beeing rather slow as it is, wouldn't Vim benefit more from improving the whole community aspect as well as connectivity?

I still use Vim, but it is a bit annoying to see well done solutions I've been using for years fall behind new projects (Hello Firebug) that accomplish more in a year than others in 20 years.

If Sublime Text was Open Source and the vi mode better I'd switch in an instant. And probably a lot of people too.

I don't want to sound snobbish and arguing without helping isn't the way to go in the open source community, but man, all that stuff that has been in development for so long, thought of in dusty university rooms, presented in worn 70's summer dresses...

It reminds me of the old tailor couple around the corner. They wont go away and probably have a lot of years to life left. A handful of people still value their skill and love to pay more. But it's an old house that hasn't been painted for a long time. You will only find it in the yellow pages and even then you're having trouble to actually find the shop because it's tiny and the house looks like it's soon to be demolished. The machines they use are old and they are the only ones who actually know how to fix them. If they die the shop is gone for good.

The same goes trough my head when I look at Vim's homepage, or Molenaars. They look like someone died or moved on to a life without the internet.

They don't make the impression that anything of value can be found. But in some places there is, scrambled across different pages by different people of different generations. Modern technology hammered into old shells. A reminder here that scripts can also be found on git. A wiki hosted on wikia there. GUI builds for Mac here, Windows there, none using any new features of the OS. It still runs, but there isn't really any love put into it.

If people talk about Vim plugins I only hear how bad VimScript is. If I install one I get it on github, not the script repository because that's where the skeletons lie. The installer I use (and the only one up-to-date) is made by the cream developers. No clue what I'd even do if they stopped producing them.

Vim became the double-edge razor a long time ago. It's cheap, it just works and I can pass it down to my kids. All it needs is some learning. But it's only noteworthy because every other kind of razor produced today sucks in one way or another.

<comment><USER9> I would say all the aspects that you find lacking with the way Vim is developed, in my opinion, is what makes it the stable, powerful editor it is today.

It is somewhat following the linux model (with Linus as the primary developer in the early days).

Just like linux, I believe this has added to the widespread popularity of Vim (ie. it is available by default on most distributions).

Vim doesn't need to "modernize". I would say its availability and ability to still stay relevant is more modern than most other open-source software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure about IDE features. The whole reason I use vim in the first place is precisely because it's _not_ an IDE. I don't want integration, I want unix instead. It's the same reason I use dwm for my desktop setup and configure everything by hand as opposed to using a desktop environment. I want technically simple software. Right now I could already easily configure/integrate vim to use gdb, gcc, git, jshint, etc. using vimscript. I prefer that over hardcoded integration. I'm just curious what's meant by IDE features. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it. At the end of the day, I trust Bram. He's created an amazing text editor and maintained it for more than 20 years.

<comment><USER11> I sort of want the inverse of IDE features; I want VIM to support APIs to make it embeddable. I should be able to use VIM as a window _inside_ eclipse, visual studio, XCode, etc. VIM will simply never replicate the thousands of man-years of work that has gone into the IDEs. And if it did, all it would achieve is being an IDE just like they are already. But I think with a relatively small amount of effort it could publish a binary API spec that would let any IDE embed it's windows (like how Eclipse embeds Internet Explorer windows).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Still motivated and eager to make improvements (and not really trivial ones) to his (free!) software after so many years to the benefit of the whole software community.

Kudos to Bram Moolenaar.

</comment><comment><USER13> Version numbers are infuriating. Dates don't overflow, people! If you're doing incremental development that doesn't have a concept of a "stable release", just use dates. This applies to projects like Firefox and the Linux kernel. I was pretty annoyed when Linus went with 3.x. Eventually, it's going to run into the same problem 2.6.x did. Date-based versioning would have lasted forever!

<comment><USER2> For internal purposes, you're probably right. For distribution and documentation purposes, I think it's much easier to understand "this plugin works on 7.3 or later" than "this plugin works on 2010-08-25 or later."

<comment><USER14> I think it doesn't have to include fully qualified date. For example, Ubuntu uses date-based versioning, e.g. 13.04

<comment><USER15> Thanks for pointing that out. It never occurred to me that their versioning is date-based.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The number one thing I'd want in vim is support for Multi Cursors, ala Sublime Text. This is something that's very hard to get right with a vim plugin, but could probably be added to core vim much more easily.

<comment><USER17> I've been using this for a few weeks: <https://github.com/terryma/vim- multiple-cursors>

Works great!

<comment><USER6> Actually, I found this plugin to be kind of buggy. However, I'm sure it'll get better soon, as it only had its first release a few weeks ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Things that I really appreciate in the list:

* add IDE features (debugger integration, shell window)

* add integration with Python instead of inventing more Vim script

* add encryption for the swapfile

And something that could be included in that list:

* Built-in support for multiple cursors

</comment><comment><USER19> Hmm, the signature looks interesting.

<comment><USER20>
      E  M  A  C  S
      s  e  l  o  h
      c  t  t  n  i
      a  a     t  f
      p        r  t
      e        o
               l

<comment><USER21> Come on , there is room for both VIM and Emacs , but i must say VIM seems more popular today.

<comment><USER22> Maybe on r/vim, but on r/emacs it seems that Emacs is, by far, the most used text editor in the whole world!

 _What I mean is that it's hard to know which editor is the most popular, it really depends on the communities you visit_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just because people who follow the vim google group want more ide features and python integration doesn't mean thats what most vim users want. Why don't they fix the obvious flaw, mouse integration? (I know, because it would be hard)

<comment><USER24> Wait, what? Since when does being in the google group let you vote? I thought you had to be a paying customer/sponsor to vote.

<comment><USER25> A paying vim customer?

<comment><USER26> yes you need to donate 10 euro to the ugandan charity Bram chose to support.

<http://www.vim.org/sponsor/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> 1\. Expand the vim philosophy to be a whole OS UI experience, be able to control all apps on the screen using vim controls.

2\. jokes aside, the most important need is probably better repl: eval result should pop up on screen.

<comment><USER28> Not quite sure what you mean - have you tried ScreenSend?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've been using Vim for close to 10 years. Can't live without it. My only gripe is the session file created with mksession is quite huge in size.

</comment><comment><USER30> I would love to see JavaScript integration so we can script vim with JavaScript.

A JavaScript debugger integration would be awesome too.

</comment><comment><USER31> A properly integrated and efficient ido for vim would be nice. CtrlP didn't work as well the last time I tried.

</comment><comment><USER32> Would love a package management solution.

<comment><USER33> Vundle is what I use.

<comment><USER32> I use Vundle too but it's often frustating. The package management in Sublime Text looks much slicker, but then Sublime Text is slick overall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone know how long it would take for the 7.4 update to reach MacVim?

</comment><comment><USER35> "Besides that, if you are maintaining runtime files, please send me any pending updates."

Sure feels like 2013.</comment>


Mark Frauenfelder: Made by Hand - <AUTHOR> http://fora.tv/2010/05/22/Mark_Frauenfelder_Made_by_Hand

<comment><AUTHOR> "Summary

Mark Frauenfelder talks about his undertakings from his new book, Made By Hand: raising chickens, beekeeping, making cigar box guitars, and more."

"Mark Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of Make and the founder of BoingBoing.net."</comment>


Startpage is now owned by an advertising company - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_is_now_owned_by_an_advertising_company/ <comment><USER2> I've worked with System1 in a previous job. One of their main products is ad arbitrage, which as far as I can tell adds zero (or negative) value to the average consumer's browsing experience. This is a company that only cares about extracting as much money as they can by finding new ways of showing you ads.

As a side note - the whole digital advertising industry reminds me a little of the financial engineering on Wall Street of the last decade. Doesn't add any new value to society - and in many ways actually harms it - but makes so much money that companies build their whole strategy around it.

<comment><USER3> Former adtech CTO here.

I've heard this argument a lot but it's hard for me to agree.

Saying that ad arbitrage doesn't "add value" is kind of like arguing that someone with a media-buying/sales role doesn't "add value" because they're just sitting in the middle taking a paycheck/commission.

Partnering with ad arbitragers isn't much different than outsourcing internal media buying/sales roles to an agency to increase reach or fill-rate.

Your point about ads being annoying to end-users isn't unique to digital. Advertisements on all mediums have always annoyed end-users. Certain implementations like full-page takeovers & loading 100 ads on a page are the most annoying. Generally it's the publisher's fault for the bad UX.

<comment><USER4> It's kind of funny how both counter-replies seem to ignore everything after the first word of "value to the average consumer's browsing experience".

<comment><USER3> Did you read the last paragraph in my post? I explicitly addressed that. My point is:

1\. Ad arbitrage has a role.

2\. The blame of annoying/bad UX is unfairly being deferred to arbitragers. It's usually the implementation that annoys users, and that's generally the publisher's fault.

I don't know anything about System1's ethics and I'm not trying defend them by any means, but I don't agree with an argument that X company is bad because they've participated in arbitrage.

<comment><USER5> I think it is entirely fair to blame arbitragers. They are the only ones who can control the advertisement implementation (as website owners no longer have direct relationships with ad providers), and they clearly fail to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It isn't exactly the ads that are the problem but the tracking. It is possible this is fine, but it seems likely to be... not fine

Edit: definitely not-fine: > Startpage is now (partly?) owned by System1, a company which...

> has developed a pre-targeting platform that identifies and unlocks consumer > intent across channels including social, native, email, search, market > research and lead generation rather than relying solely on what consumers > enter into search boxes

<comment><USER7> Hey, Startpage here. We appreciate your concern. We would be wary ourselves of outside investment in a company that we trust and depend on. Startpage leadership spent a lot of time considering who to bring on as an investor. The System1 funds will allow us to grow our global user base and bring private search to more people.

To ensure that our mission and privacy practices do not change, the investment includes covenants that ensure Startpage's founders in the Netherlands will retain complete control over all privacy-related decisions.

If you're interested, you can read more about the investment in this letter from our Founder and CEO Robert E.G. Beens: [https://preview.redd.it/zher3ok6pct3†1.jpg](https://preview.redd.it/zher3ok6pct3†1.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi Everyone, Startpage here. We are happy to answer any questions people have, please feel free to ask us.

To start, we've addressed some existing comments and questions with the information below. I'd also suggest reading this open letter about the acquisition from Startpage Founder and CEO Robert E.G. Beens ([https://preview.redd.it/zher3ok6pct31.jpg](https://preview.redd.it/zher3ok6pct31.jpg)).

\- To ensure that our mission and privacy practices do not change, the investment includes covenants that ensure Startpage's founders in the Netherlands will retain complete control over all privacy-related decisions.

\- Robert still has final say over all product decisions, and Startpage will always be headquartered in the Netherlands.

\- System1 invested in Startpage because they recognize increasing consumer demand for privacy-focused tools, not because they plan to alter Startpage's core mission in any way.

\- We will never compromise or weaken Startpage's industry-leading privacy policy.

\- We will not depart from Startpage's core business model, which has been profitable since 2006. We make money with contextual ads (based solely on your search query) vs. other search engines that make money with behavioral ads (based on your personal profile and browsing history).

\- The purpose of this investment is to allow Startpage to reach more users worldwide and advance our mission of making safe, private search available to everyone.

<comment><USER8> I'm a senior engineer at Startpage, and I can personally confirm all of the above. Our system is implemented in such a way that we never store a user's search query, IP address, or any other personally identifying information, and that will never change. If anyone is interested, I can answer specific questions about technical details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe Qwant [1] is a good alternative? I'm interested what others think about it. It's European and they seem to respect privacy. I like their detailed FAQ [2]. According to Wikipedia they use their own indexing service but collaborate with the Bing ad network [3].

[1] [https://www.qwant.com/](https://www.qwant.com/) [2] [https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-make- mon...](https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-make-money/) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant)

<comment><USER10> Qwant is powered by bing under the hood. Wikipedia is wrong about that.

[https://news.microsoft.com/europe/features/qwant-and- microso...](https://news.microsoft.com/europe/features/qwant-and-microsoft- announce-an-exclusive-partnership-for-a-unique-internet-research-experience/) \-- dated May 22, 2019

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So is it recommended to stop using Startpage? Use DuckDuckGo? Is there a way to roll your own to post on your own DigitalOcean/Linode/Docker hosting solution?

<comment><USER12> [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx)

<comment><USER13> The problem with hosting your own instance of searx is that you will most likely be one of the only users and since the underlying search engine (Google, etc) knows where the traffic came from (your instance) they can pin it on you so you might as well just use Google directly. Also, I keep getting captcha errors when I try to use searx.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does Startpage make money? How does it plan to make money in the future?

<comment><USER7> Startpage has been a profitable business since 2006. We make money with contextual ads (based solely on your search query) vs. other search engines that make money with behavioral ads (based on your personal profile and browsing history). These contextual ads appear on the top of each search results page. As a condition of the investment terms, this will always be our business model on search. The investment we received will be used to reach more users worldwide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice discussion going on at PTIO about delisting: [https://forum.privacytools.io/t/candidate-for-delisting- disc...](https://forum.privacytools.io/t/candidate-for-delisting-discussion- startpage/284/3)

</comment><comment><USER16> Startpage uses Google's results yet does Google offer an API like Bing does?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, Google does offer such a (paid) API, that is what Startpage uses.

<comment><USER16> Anyone know how many other semi-known search engines are using it? Also, your searches are completely anonymous using any third party Goggle search engine?

<comment><USER10> Every search engine box you see on the Internet is powered by google or bing, basically, with Yandex having a tiny piece. And part of System1's business is syndicating google/bing APIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is Startpage?

<comment><AUTHOR> A wrapper around Google search. Supposed to be: great results, no tracking, respect for privacy.

<comment><USER18> Never heard of it. What's the advantage over DuckDuckGo?

<comment><USER19> Not a pro or con: DDG uses Bing results, startpage uses Google results

<comment><USER20> EDIT: The comment I replied to here has since been changed. xref originally wrote: "DDG uses Bing results, startpage uses Google results"

\---

You haven't described an advantage with this reply. Or, at least, reasoning why you believe it's an advantage.

<comment><USER21> Most people believe (at least as far as I know them), that google results are better than bing.

Plus star page has super useful anonimized view. It's essentially anon proxy built into search page. It's useful if you have to go look trough doggy websites.

<comment><USER20> >Most people believe (at least as far as I know them), that google results are better than bing.

This doesn't help. A lot of people believe things which don't always hold up to scrutiny.

<comment><USER22> For many people, Google results are an advantage. Much as for many people targeted results are an advantage. Your definition of advantage seems unreasonably strict.

<comment><USER20> This is a bizarre comment. I've not made any assertions or definitions. My initial comment was in reply to an unsupported assertion. Perhaps your comment was in response to someone else.

<comment><USER22> Not at all, and it was aimed at you.

When you asked for support for the assertion, it was given, but you continued to disagree.

However, for people who prefer Google, using Google results is an advantage. You seem to be working under some stronger definition of advantage (for example: "an advantage is only an advantage of everyone agrees it is am advantage"), and such advantages are rare enough to be an unreasonable requirement.

<comment><USER20> >Not at all, and it was aimed at you.

>When you asked for support for the assertion, it was given, but you continued to disagree.

The "support" that the other poster submitted was: "Most people believe (at least as far as I know them) ..."

I don't suspect many folks would accept that as anything more than anecdotal.

>However, for people who prefer Google, using Google results is an advantage. You seem to be working under some stronger definition of advantage (for example: "an advantage is only an advantage of everyone agrees it is am advantage"), and such advantages are rare enough to be an unreasonable requirement.

Look, I get it, you like Google. You work for Google. That's all well and good. You're argument(s) toward me come off as a bit defensive, however. There was a baseless assertion given in response to someone asking for information and I called that into question.

My arguments here aren't for or against Google, but in support of substantive dissemination of information which the original comment I replied to was not.

<comment><USER22> I'm making an entirely semantic argument that has nothing to do with Google in particular. I'm calling out bad reasoning on your part.

Startpage has an advantage over ddg because some people prefer Google search results.

Equally, ddg has an advantage over startpage because some people prefer being results or prefer to not use Google.

It doesn't matter if even a single person prefers Google to bing. For that single person, startpage has an advantage. The reverse of this is again, also true. Anecdotal evidence is, in this case, more than enough to justify the assertion.[0] That is, unless you're working under some unusually strong definition of advantage. Which I'll note you still haven't provided. Instead of, perhaps, saying "yes I don't consider a relative advantage that applies only to a potentially small group of people to be an advantage", you took the opportunity to make irrelevant attacks on my character.

[0]: if you want non anecdotal evidence though: both have users. This implies each has a relative advantage over the other to some subset of the population, otherwise one would take all the users from that other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what this means for StartMail's (startpage's email) clients?

<comment><USER24> From the Reddit thread [1], StartMail is a separate company and wasn't part of the acquisition.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_is_now_owned_by_an_advertising_company/f3w9isn/)

<comment><USER7> Yes, that is correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Every search engine that uses ads and affiliate links as primary method to monetize searches is in essence owned by advertising company which includes Google and DuckDuckGo.

</comment><comment><USER26> Posted on Reddit, which is also an advertising company.

</comment><comment><USER27> Private.sh [1] cryptographically protects your privacy.

[1] [https://private.sh](https://private.sh)

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I don't think private.sh _can_ provide the kind of protection that they seem to imply is their goal; sure, they can encrypt your traffic in the browser, but unless the search engine(s) they use as a backend are the ones are decrypting it then private.sh controls the exit nodes and can MitM anything they want.

<comment><USER28> It's just marketing bullshit.

<comment><USER27> The query is encrypted with the publickey of gigablast, clientside. Private.sh cannot see the query/search. And vice versa, the results are encrypted with the client's public key and thus can only be decrypted by the client!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GlobalSigned off - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/13/globalsigned_off/ <comment><USER2> Updated with a better title: "GlobalSign screw-up cancels top websites' HTTPS certificates"</comment>


Internet Explorer vs Humanity - <AUTHOR> http://blog.timoxley.com/post/25077257844/internet-explorer-vs-humanity

<comment><USER2> _Internet Explorer could easily be the single biggest hinderance to human advancement ever, in the history of humanity._

Lame April Fools. (I am giving him the benefit of the doubt)

<comment><USER3> Yes, IE6's inability to render transparent PNGs and CSS rendering incompatibilities are as big a crime against humanity as genocide on an industrial scale and molesting/raping children.

<comment><USER4> Too bad the "war on terror" is still going on. Maybe once it's over, the whole world can join in and start a "war on IE" and send the responsible parties in Guantanamo.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Asciimatics: a cross-platform terminal animation/drawing library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics <comment><USER2> This looks neat! The examples are really cool: [https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics/wiki](https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics/wiki). My favorites are [https://asciinema.org/a/31718](https://asciinema.org/a/31718), where the snow sticks to the trees, and [https://asciinema.org/a/19920](https://asciinema.org/a/19920), which shows layering.</comment>


No It's Not Always Quicker to Do Things in Memory - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/article/2901453/no-its-not-always-quicker-to-do-things-in-memory.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This article is an amazing example of poor journalism, snake-oil science and bad benchmarking.

Basically three Chemistry majors have "proven" that string concatenation in languages which have immutable strings is O(n^2) in the number of concatenations.

</comment><comment><USER2> It looks like the authors have not heard about kernel-level page cache. No fsync was ever used in the benchmarks, therefore, it is never actually hitting the disk. The only good thing about this paper is that the Java and Python listings are available at the end, for everyone to identify the basic flaws in this research.

It's actually proving that it is faster to write directly to memory than to do a copy before writing to memory. Nothing really impressive there. :)</comment>


Godmother of Unix admins Evi Nemeth presumed lost at sea - o0-0o http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/05/evi_nemeth_unix_dead/

<comment><AUTHOR> "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook" is pretty much The Manual for sys admins. I am very grateful to all the authors of these books and offer my condolences to family and friends of Evi Nemeth.

[http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/unix-and-linux-system- admini...](http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/unix-and-linux-system- administration-handbook-evi-nemeth/1101637009)</comment>


Seeking tech cofounder/collaborator-Adventure travel startup - <AUTHOR>

Seeking Technical Collaborator/Cofounder to help build an Exciting Adventure Travel Website from the ground up.
The Adventure Travel industry is a 100 billion/year business and is the fastest growing segment of the travel industry (not to mention nearly recession proof!). As one of the last frontiers in online travel, it is extremely fragmented. Therefore, finding information for your next outdoor vacation is extremely time consuming! Come help my partner and I build a solution!
What we Have:
Industry Knowledge,  Connections, & Passion, Strong Design Skills & Working Ability in XHTML/CSS, Extensive Business Planning, Detailed Wireframes & Functional Specifications
What we Need:
Someone to interpret the needs of the business and make decisions about the proper technologies to implement on the backend.
There are no specific preferences in place with regard to coding languages.
Seeking True Cofounder to work with us from the ground Up!
Founder's equity will be granted in lieu of pay. (bootstrapped startup!)
Major PLUS - an interest in the outdoors, biking, hiking, adventure travel!!!
Strongly prefer someone in NYC tri state area (NY, NJ, CT)!!! <comment><USER2> > "What you should explain is why this techie isn't going to be the one > sitting around doing all the work while you tell him what to do."

Building a startup isn't only about coding... you need to create the brand and make the target public aware of your product (marketing). Thus, connections helps and the will to execute the idea is essential. Most business people that comes up to me with a new venture talks like this, I see nothing wrong there. You also need to do all the paperwork to make your startup legal, etc. For all I know, you guys seem pretty serious about your project and that's a good thing :)

> "In other words, you really need to sell yourselves as people who can make > something happen. Do you have a track record?"

Yes, it would be interesting to know why the startup is different that the rest so we know it's not one of those bad startups that goes nowhere. You don't need lots of details, just a simple explanation about the vision & scope of your project and why we shouldn't use the online travel sites that already exist on the internet. What is different about your project and what is the competition? (no competition is not an answer! ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> What you should explain is why this techie isn't going to be the one sitting around doing all the work while you tell him what to do. In other words, you really need to sell yourselves as people who can make something happen. Do you have a track record?

<comment><AUTHOR> shocking that I should get such a response.

on one end, there is a TON of legwork with regard to my idea that involves reaching out to each adventure operator and incorporating content into the site. I did mention it was extremely fragmented and a lot of the value would come from bringing information together/generating unique content.

also, i did learn to hack in xhtml/css and although i know they are not true programming languages it is a start in that i can at least hack together part of a front end

<comment><USER3> > shocking that I should get such a response.

Not really - looks like you've been here a while, so you knew that. I'm not saying your deal is no good, just that you're going to have to work hard to sell people on yourselves. Working for free has big opportunity costs for everyone involved, and as you must have seen here, everyone has bumped into the "I have a wonderful idea I just need you to do it for me for free" types, so I'm just giving you a suggestion to show you're not like that.

> Major PLUS - an interest in the outdoors, biking, hiking, adventure > travel!!!

> Strongly prefer someone in NYC tri state area (NY, NJ, CT)

Why would anyone who loves the outdoors live in that area?;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> The "shocking" part was completely sarcastic :) I totally understand the value of one's time. i am not hoping to ignite that whole business person vs coder battle or come across as a business person jerk, which is why I am presenting myself as a tech collaborator who will build the front end.i myself have already spent countless hours baking the idea, talking to industry experts, etc</comment></comment></comment></comment>


XKCD: Piano - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/532/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how many people get the punchline. Is the joke on which it's based _that_ well known?

<comment><USER3> I have no clue what it's based on and just don't get it :(

<comment><USER2> Not everyone "gets" xkcd anyway, but in this case, show people this one and ask them if they know the joke.

Alternatively, ignore it.

<comment><USER4> I'm the only one in my immediate circle that reads xkcd. Can you point me towards a reference?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Path Less Taken to the Peak of the Math World (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-path-less-taken-to-the-peak-of-the-math-world-20170627/ <comment><USER2> I remember working on the log-concavity thing back in 1989 or so. I remember getting very excited that I'd proved a couple of small cases, but at the time didn't realise that it was such a big thing. I doubt I would ever have proved the whole thing, but it's interesting to see it pop up, and it does make me wonder ...</comment>


Avoiding Pipeline Stalls in Hyper-Threaded Processors - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=52IRMFJZJZRZPQE1GHPSKHWATMY32JVN?articleID=225702843 <comment><USER2> It this an article that time forgot? It's about the failed Netburst Intel microarchitecture used by e.g. the Pentium 4. AMD stayed with the Pentium Pro approach and Intel returned to it; I have no idea (at least based on the article) if the features described in this article made it into later microarchitectures.</comment>


Why big companies sometimes lose out to startups (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newdelhitimes.org/archives/2008/08/why_big_compani.html <comment><USER2> This is an OK article, I liked the bit about short term focus and would be interested to see some data on that. However, as far as innovation goes, Clayton Christiansen summarizes this problem much better in "The Innovators Dilemma"

His studies showed that its not that big companies don't have the resources to form teams to do spin-off projects, they do try. The problem is that they miss ever identifying the opportunities that are very successful because they don't initially serve the same customer base that the company currently has (although they often grow into it).</comment>


Check-in before code review is an antipattern - <AUTHOR> https://jamesmckay.net/2015/07/check-in-before-code-review-is-an-antipattern/ <comment><USER2> What a misleading title! He's speaking approvingly of pull-request-based workflow, which is not what anyone is going to think the title of the article means.

<comment><USER3> Furthermore it's mostly a rant against subversion rather than going making any kind of argument about his assertions.

Plus anybody who advocates the use of git rebase --interactive as a sensible response to code review feedback is clearly insane.

<comment><USER4> > Plus anybody who advocates the use of git rebase --interactive as a sensible > response to code review feedback is clearly insane.

Why? Prior to a series of changes being pulled into someone else's history you have all the incentive in the world to present the cleanest view of history possible. Moreover, if you can rebase -i on top of master you can turn the merge into a fast-forward rather than an actual merge. A more linear history with fewer merges is much easier to bisect as well as to read, generally.

<comment><USER5> You present a clean history, yes, but not a correct one. The context in which you made your changes, often noted as important, has been lost.

<comment><USER6> In the general case, I agree; rebases do lose a bit of context. As a code reviewer, however, I find the reason I most often ask for a rebase & squash is that the "context" that I'm asking to lose is simply the author isn't taking the proper time to think about what he or she is doing, and it shows, in commit messages like,

      * I can't spell
      * fix tests, too, lol
      * fixed for real
      * fixed
      * minor touchup
      * Implement feature foobar from issue #123

Once the code review has completed, this history is not going to ever be useful again; worse, it impedes someone looking through the logs for useful history, and other operations like cherry-picking this feature to a branch.

<comment><USER7> I'd argue that what you're describing shouldn't even be called a rebase, even though you could use "rebase -i" to accomplish it. For example, I just use "reset --soft ; commit" instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Git has some serious disadvantages when compared to a centralized VCS like Perforce. It just can't handle anything more than 10~15 million lines of code (this is the size of linux.git).

In a way, Perforce is a cute middle ground. It has "pending changelists" that ReviewBoard or Phabricator can slurp up and present to reviewers. You can easily give another person your changes by "shelving" them. Mutable history is only really a "feature" in tiny projects; in massive ones, immutability simplifies life greatly and restores peace of mind. In many ways, the way Perforce handles conflicts is nicer: it doesn't pollute the actual files with conflict markers, and has an option to resolve conflicts in a nice 3-pane UI. Although it does get merges wrong every now and then.

Non-linear history is considered an "anti-feature" by many, and the LLVM community runs a primary SVN server; users submit via git-svn.

Having cheap and lightweight branching is what leads to merge headaches. In fact, (from one Tech Talk), I believe that Google runs a single branch to evade merge problems altogether.

I think git's greatest asset is the excellent local development experience. You can muck around as much as you like, making local branches/commits as checkpoints, and squash them in to submit a final patch. The command-line UI is fantastic, and everything is snappy (provided you have a small checkout). I think having a single linear "trunk" on the server-side is a good idea.

<comment><USER9> > Non-linear history is considered an "anti-feature" by many, and the LLVM > community runs a primary SVN server; users submit via git-svn.

> Having cheap and lightweight branching is what leads to merge headaches. In > fact, (from one Tech Talk), I believe that Google runs a single branch to > evade merge problems altogether.

Running a single branch also gets rid of the nonlinear history problem. We do it where I work and it works great. Every developer submits PRs from feature branches on their forked copy of the main repo, which get merged in after review and testing. At any time, we can roll back to the previously deployed version of prod if we have to.

Mutable history is also nice for these forked repos, since it allows us to squash commits and eliminate any wrong turns we take in the development process, leaving the main repo's history cleaner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's no reason you can't do code reviews on SVN branches prior to merging to the trunk. My teams do this every day. It helps to have a dedicated code review tool such as Atlassian Crucible.

And I wouldn't necessarily characterize SVN branching as "clunky, user- unfriendly and error-prone". It might be slightly worse than Git, but with modern tools like Eclipse there's hardly a difference. I've never found SVN branching difficult at all.

<comment><USER11> What's your workflow? Do developers check in bug fixes in trunk? TIA.

<comment><USER12> Not him, but where I last worked once you had your dirty working directory, you'd run rbtool to upload the changes to reviewboard, where they could get looked at.

Once it was approved, you committed. A hook in the svn server would check that you had a link to the reviewboard entry, the entry was approved, and that your changes matched the diff that was approved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I agree with the main thesis. But I wonder about:

> _Subversion makes branching and merging so clunky, user-unfriendly and > error-prone that it simply isn't practical_

Is this really a technical problem, or is it more cultural? I'm not very familiar with Git... is there really something there that makes this fundamentally easier?

<comment><USER14> Git branching is fast and very simple. A 'git checkout -b FOO' and you've got one made. You can flip back and forth between branches with a single command as well, which makes very easy to set up experiments (say you wanted to profile a couple different prototypes), or you are working on three different new features at the same time.

Branches are also very easy to move around the revision history. If I created a branch 3 months ago, and I wanted to go back and pull that back onto mainline, I can easy 'rebase' those changes as if I created the branch off of the most recent commit. Again, it's a single command that, barring merge conflicts, just works.

Branches can also be pushed and pulled from one machine to another. Got started working on a feature, but can't finish it in this sprint? Have a coworker pull that branch to their box and pick it up. Made an experimental change? Push that branch back to the server so others can take a look.

Git branching absolutely changed the way I write code. I create branches all the time, because they are so cheap I can use them to mess around with small changes without worrying about messing up mainline or my current feature branches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Note that the author's point about git (the technology) is what it enables users to do.

Teams can still use git or subversion or mercurial and have terrible code review processes, just as they can use Slack or IRC and have terrible communication, or use Ruby, C, Haskell, or ECMAScript 2 and have beautiful or nightmarish code.

Takeaways:

1) Technology is a tool, not an end in itself. 2) People are the hard part. Technology can open the door, but that doesn't mean someone will walk through it.

<comment><USER7> Or how about this: If you have a social problem, don't start with a technological solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Should be titled "Check-in to trunk/master before code review is an antipattern".

</comment><comment><USER17> The recommendation seems to be to lock down the code base to the elite few. How about instead, we implement regression testing, employ a competent development team and communicate the software design before coding. Code reviews address the effects, not the cause of the problem.

<comment><USER18> We do peer code reviews in pull requests which require at least n people to approve, as well has automated tests which run and report their status back (blocking the PR if tests fail).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> calling things "anti-patterns" might itself be an "anti-pattern"

I don't even disagree with the thesis of the article. its just that the choice of language here obscures the point and makes it harder to focus on what the author is actually trying to say.

</comment><comment><USER20> The word antipattern is an antipattern.

<comment><USER21> "'Considered harmful' considered harmful" ([http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html](http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html))?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's probably a very good reason why there is no subversionhub.com

</comment><comment><USER23> Honestly, if you are working on a standalone feature with complicated math/distributed algorithm/transactional concurrency etc. only a handful people in the world understand, how is a code review going to help you beside trivial matters like code formatting/naming? How do you approach this situation in order not to upset the few people that can get it done?

I remember SUN's application servers had a licensed code inside their transactional core nobody was able to understand nor touch; it just worked as it was supposed to, prepared by a single genius who got it right.

<comment><USER24> You still can make dumb mistakes in genius code. And if your teammates can't follow the code at all, then it should either be better documented or they better educated. Having code that is untouchable because the lone genius left the company/got hit by a bus isn't something to be celebrated.

<comment><USER23> Sure, but companies like SUN have huge automated testing suites that run after each commit, as well as gazillion of branches. And the author of the code is most likely contributing plenty of those tests, if only in philosophical sense (by the hands of accompanying SDET).

And whether you like it or not, the best companies rise and fall with geniuses. You can't automate them away. You can only accommodate them or they go elsewhere and you are done.</comment></comment></comment>


Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/object-oriented-programming-is-an-expensive-disaster-which-must-end <comment><USER2> For a non-Kaysian interpretation of object-oriented.</comment>


Show HN: Gym Lender – Find and book other people's home gyms - <AUTHOR> https://gymlender.com/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the startup idea generator that spat out "airbnb for workouts". My reaction to the basic idea is the same I had for a startup I saw on Shark Tank (I think), which was airbnb for pools. And that reaction is: ewwww, no thanks.

I just can't imagine ever using such a thing. Of course, I'm not a gym user in general so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea, sounds like a nightmare for insurance underwriters though, if according to the T&C hosts are to obtain insurance on their own? Merely curious: does anyone know any providers who would underwrite a policy that covers you in case a total stranger hurts themselves on your leg press?</comment>