Quitting Chrome: Because Google+ - <AUTHOR> This weekend I made a fairly major change to how I interact with the web- I consciously switched default browsers. Fed up with Google's constant ramming of G+ down my throat, I've decided to hit 'em where it hurts: their marketshare. So I've switched to Firefox, and while noticeably slower, I feel it's a browser I can put more trust into.
Google should be employing a strategy of invisible control over how people interact, not forcing a centralized interaction layer on something that is inherently decentralized. They should be quietly creating and controlling channels of communication that I cannot live without. Apply the strategy that grew their search engine to all Google initiatives.
Or I will find alternatives. <comment><USER4> This sounds backwards to me. If anything, you should be quitting Google, the search engine, rather than their browser. Google can live without you being a Chrome user, but it hurts them if you switch to Bing or duckduckgo.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but switching to Firefox also hurts _me_ a lot less than switching to Duck Duck Go.

<comment><USER6> DDG is great. The instant answers feature is awesome, honestly I prefer it.

<comment> a-nikolaev Agreed. I have been using DDG for ~two years. Maybe once or twice a week, I actually ask DDG to search in google (with awesome "!g" or "!img" bang- commands). DDG works consistently great, and the new DDG is even better, with auto-completion, images and video tabs. And I'm using Firefox as well.

<comment><USER7> Save yourself half the keystrokes!

!img == !i

<comment><USER8> Huh, and all this time I've been using !gi

You, sir, have just increased my productivity by 33.3%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      > Google should be employing a strategy of invisible
      > control over how people interact, [...] They should be
      > quietly creating and controlling channels of
      > communication that I cannot live without.

Wait, what? You don't mind a third party controlling how you interact, but you hate being _told_ about it?

<comment><USER10> It sounds to me more like, "Make it so good it's indispensable to me, rather than trying to force me to use it"

<comment><USER9> Using Google doesn't require an account of any kind, and a Google+ account is only required for social features such as posting comments or sharing links.

The launch state of Google+ provided an extremely hostile experience due to policies such as "one social identity per account" and "use a government- approved non-ethnic name", but these issues were resolved years ago with the Pages feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I dont understand when people find firefox noticeably slower. I wonder if thats related to OSX.

Regardless, I agree with the move 100%. Thanksfully, while Firefox may not be the best, its very good/useable for everything.

If ever it isnt good enough anymore and there is no other replacement - <USER2> is when we'll really be cornered

<comment><USER12> > _I dont understand when people find firefox noticeably slower._

In my experience, people who think Chrome is faster than Firefox never have hundreds of tabs open.

I like Chrome and I use it for development, but I use Firefox for general web browsing because it handles hundreds of tabs much, much better. Not only is Firefox's performance better, but Firefox extensions such Tree Style Tab and Session Manager are vastly superior to the tab management extensions that are available for Chrome. For example, I'm still waiting for a Chrome extension that supports the basic task of appending the current window to a previously saved session.

<comment><USER13> Browsers that use several child processes (like IE, Chrome, Safari/WebKit2) are faster, have less latency, crashes involve only one tab and the child processes run with limited OS priviledges ("sandbox") than browsers with only one process (Firefox, Safari/WebKit1).

Mozilla is working on a multi-process Firefox, one can activate it with a hidden flag (it is still not production ready, and it will break several old plugins).

With multi-process browsers one can have hundreds of tabs open for weeks (if you have enough RAM like 8+ GB).

<comment><USER14> > Browsers that use several child processes (like IE, Chrome, Safari/WebKit2) > are faster, have less latency, crashes involve only one tab and the child > processes run with limited OS priviledges ("sandbox") than browsers with > only one process (Firefox, Safari/WebKit1).

It's more complicated than that. For one thing, "have less latency" is often the opposite: a keypress in a multiprocess browser has to travel from the user-facing process to the child process, then the effects have to travel back. In a single-process browser, there is no need to cross that boundary back and forth. You can see this in action in games for example, where you can sometimes see more input lag in multiprocess browsers.

Regarding speed, depends how you define it. Definitely multiprocess gives you responsiveness - one slow tab doesn't slow down the others. But throughput, not necessarily.

Overall though, multiprocess is a good thing. I'm just saying it isn't a win across the board, like everything it has downsides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've done the same.

I use gmail a lot, I have an Android phone and I was using desktop Chrome for years. However I started to notice things that worried me, for example I would be using Chrome on my PC but definitely not logged into Gmail / Google+, then I would see that my recent google searches from the desktop Chrome would appear in my recent searches list on Android within seconds. I could somewhat accept that if I was logged in to Google, but I don't accept that if I am logged out.

On one hand the functionality is pretty impressive, on the other hand my gut feeling is they have gone too far.

<comment><USER9> Chrome logins are separate from Google web logins; go into your Chrome settings and sign out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I switched browsers for a different reason: I installed OS X Yosemite beta and it seems like the Safari browser uses far less COU resources, noticeable by longer battery life.

<comment><USER17> My apologies for the off-topic, but I wanted to ask how you are finding Yosemite - is it stable enough for me to switch over my dev machine?

<comment><USER18> Yes, is pretty stable on my old MacBook white. The only thing that crashed was Xcode Playgrounds.

You also will see some pixelated rounded corners for some contextual menus... but hey, this is beta.

[http://i.imgur.com/IMys5f6.png](http://i.imgur.com/IMys5f6.png)

<comment><USER19> How are you running Yosemite on a white MacBook? Is it a 4,1 2008-ish MacBook that maxes out at 4GB of RAM? Just curious, because I have one of those but I'm still running SL on it because I figured Mavericks would be a dog.

<comment><USER18> I have a MacBook White Unibody (13-inch, Late 2009) with 8GB of RAM. This have a 64-Bit architecture and I can run the latest OSX without any problems.

[http://support.apple.com/kb/sp579](http://support.apple.com/kb/sp579)

<comment><USER20> > two SO-DIMM slots support up to 4GB

... confused

<comment><USER18> I think the reason Apple specified 4GB is max is because four years ago there were not any 4GB sticks for testing and Apple does not retest years later for a discontinued product.

[http://i.imgur.com/CKbdu6c.png](http://i.imgur.com/CKbdu6c.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand why Chromium isn't a more popular alternative to Google Chrome. It's the open-source basis of Google Chrome. It runs noticeably faster than Firefox, while being similarly trustworthy. It's a great browser, available on all conventional operating systems. What's not to like?

<comment><USER9> Chromium doesn't have stable builds, and the official snapshot binaries don't auto-update. This isn't so bad if you're using an OS with a package manager such as Debian, but it makes Chromium completely impractical for Windows and MacOS users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Firefox is faster these days. If you find it slower then you probably have addons that are slowing things down.

Try disabling your addons and enable them one by one to find the culprit.

</comment><comment><USER23> Make sure to turn off things like the google autocomplete thing in the address bar then, because firefox does that too. I was surprised, looking at wireshark lol.

</comment><comment><USER24> I switched from Chrome as my default browser after two years of using it just two months back. Sometimes Firefox isn't able to render certain websites and rather spits out the html, but aside from that, I haven't had any issues. I think it works noticeably faster for me. I use it on both OS X and Windows, and it works great on both. It is also a lot more customizable and lets me run my own sync servers.

<comment><USER25> I find the problem you mention very odd. I've used Firefox for over a year and have never seen anything like that. Is it possible that you have some configuration messing it up? Otherwise all I can think of is that the sites are sending html content with the Content-Type header of "text/plain" and Chrome is deciding to render it as html based on other clues (which would be non-standard behavior).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26>
      Google should be employing a strategy of invisible control

Uh, no thanks. I'm not interested in being controlled by anyone, and I chafe at the idea of any corporate strategy that attempts to do so.

</comment><comment><USER27> I simply don't use Chrome because it is a closed source browser from an advertising company.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've tried chrome/mozilla, and did not like either.

I use Opera and highly suggest it!

Issue I had with chorme is when I would open up a new tab it would flash to a white screen quickly before loading the background image of my home/speeddial page.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am using Safari because it's faster for multi tabbed browsing and I can use WebKit's "FTL" JavaScript JIT compiler.

</comment><comment><USER29> Well, what is the point so? You're dropping Google Chrome because you think google should control you more?

</comment><comment><USER30> I would switch if I could find a way to use multi-user profiles. Is there a way to do this with Firefox ?

<comment><USER31> You can create several profiles and even run them simultaneously. Each profile can have its own collection of bookamrks, add-ons, etc.

[http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/firefox-profiles-run- multiple-f...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/firefox-profiles-run-multiple- firefox-profiles/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have switched once my laptop started lagging when Chrome is opened. Even mouse pointer stopped moving.

</comment><comment><USER33> Iron browser = Chrome without Google.

</comment><comment><USER34> Opera = chrome - <USER3>

</comment><comment><USER35> Try EpicBrowser.com -- built on chromium but designed to protect your privacy with everything Google ripped out.

<comment><USER36> I like the idea, but I'll wait until they publish the source.</comment></comment>


Why Hacking DNA Is the Secret of Deep-Space Travel - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a18496/why-synthetic-lifeforms-are-the-secret-of-deep-space-travel/ <comment><USER2> The way we are talking about space travel is probably the same way the people of Florence, Italy spoke of Da Vinci flying machines, submarine and his armored "car."

When you consider the dangers of just getting to Mars and how long that project will take, I suspect we are a century or two away.

[http://www.da-vinci-inventions.com/armoured-car.aspx](http://www.da-vinci- inventions.com/armoured-car.aspx)

<comment><USER3> _" When you consider the dangers of just getting to Mars and how long that project will take, I suspect we are a century or two away."_ Compare how dangerous it was to set man on the Moon in the 60s to getting to Mars. Its just risk. You can manage risk. Getting there isn't the real problem. Staying alive is.

<comment><USER2> The Moon shot was an awesome feat. If we threw our Iraq/Syria/Afghanistan budget perhaps we could overcome the logistical challenges, such as the massive amount of weight we would be sending. The food bulk, return fuel, zero-g health effects, cosmic ray brain damage and timing the return voyage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm reminded of author Peter Watts' _Blindsight_ where travel beyond the asteroid belt required genetic modification (to allow the squishy hairless monkeys to hibernate for the required time).

</comment><comment><USER5> I've always thought the only realistic way life would spread throughout the galaxy would be by engineered space-faring cells. Being synthetically created, they would technically be human offspring.

<comment> semi-extrinsic In Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe, there are mentions of the "Americano era", which was an earlier attempt to settle star systems in the way you describe. The Americano civilication crashed in one generation because growing up without parents, a higher percentage (I think ~2-3%) of people became murdering psychopaths. That such people would be off their rockers is a plausible hypothesis, but fortunately no-one's tested it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The headline reminded me of the anime "Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet"

It's pretty good and on Netflix, at least it is in Australia.

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought this was going to be about hacking our own DNA (perhaps like the water bear) to harden it for space travel.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am reminded of H. R. Giger's designs for the movie Alien. They don't seem so far-fetched now.

<comment><USER9> And especially the prequels...:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> No mention of self-modification?</comment>


25 year-old's company makes millions on cracked iPhone screens [video] - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/power-pitch/25-old-millions-cracked-iphones-123419416.html

<comment><USER2> I was traveling in Laos last year and I fell while riding a scooter through the jungle and my iPhone cracked. As I reached Cambodia, I walked in a random phone repair shop in Phnom Penh and had my screen completely replaced in 10 minutes for about $40 (probably overcharged for being a tourist). Still using that same iPhone now, one year later. I would imagine phone repair shops everywhere can do this, or not? While watching the video, I almost felt like watching The Onion.

<comment><USER3> yeah thought the same. There are like 3-4 shops that do this in every city. When my girlfriend recently cracked her iPhone 4 screen i just went on ebay to get a new one for EUR 38 (Germany) and repaired it myself. Works totally fine now, i wouldnt do this on a brand new iphone 5 though ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They can augment their income by fixing broken power buttons, which is a growing problem that Apple refuses to touch:

[https://discussions.apple.com/message/22136029#22136029](https://discussions.apple.com/message/22136029#22136029)

<comment><AUTHOR> iCracked repairs almost every aspect of an iDevice including power buttons!

<comment><USER5> How? I don't see the power button option on the site.

[EDIT] Seems martin_ meant you can buy a new button/sensor and a repair kit, and then follow instructions similar to these: [http://www.imore.com/how-diy- repair-stuck-or-broken-iphone-4...](http://www.imore.com/how-diy-repair-stuck- or-broken-iphone-4s-power-button)

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue selection is definitely limited. An "other" category would be a good idea!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly - in the past few weeks the Genius Bar in most locations (I can confirm boston/cambridge) has gotten a calibration machine letting them do a screen replacement in store for $150 (cheaper and done by apple). Refurb is $229.

Tough to compete with that.

[http://gizmodo.com/the-apple-stores-new-mystery-machine- help...](http://gizmodo.com/the-apple-stores-new-mystery-machine-helps- unbreak-you-511625021)

<comment><USER7> Is $150 considered cheap in the US? I only ask as I had my iPhone4S screen repaired for just under £30 here in the UK by a local electronics shop and the quality was outstanding.

<comment><USER6> I was just comparing the rates for iCracked and Apple. There is a place in harvard square that does it for $50.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A friend of mine runs a repair shop in Miami. He told me that a few of his competitors were raided by the DOJ for doing unlicensed repairs using Oem parts from china. Apple apparently didn't want anyone other than official stores doing repairs. Guy whose shop was raided had thousands in parts confiscated.

<comment><USER9> Huh? This doesn't make any sense. There is no IP right that lets you prevent non OEM parts to be installed in a product. If that were the case mechanics would all be out of business. There must have been another issue here.

<comment><USER10> The parent said it was OEM parts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Apple should just fix their phones. Its ridiculous how fast the screen cracks on an iPhone. I have so many friends (me included) who had a cracked iphone 4/4s/5 in the past few years while my brother drops his Galaxy S2 all the time and the screen is totally fine.

<comment><USER11> Contra-anecdotal evidence: I owned 3 iPhones over the years (original, 3GS, 4S) and never used a case. I never broke anything on them. The only concession to preservation I made was to make sure it was the only thing in that pocket (no change, keys, pocketknife, etc. in there with it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Genuinely curious about how this is a venture-funded company. How is this scalable? Is there any tech involved at all? (Not that technology is necessary to be venture-funded, but it helps with nonlinear growth.)

<comment><USER13> We believe that this is absolutely scalable as we've watched successful growth into national and international markets. On the technology front, we have created an incredible on demand geolocational dispatch and communications service. Our unique iOS app for our worldwide iTechs empowers them to be connected to this service at all times allowing them to successfully run their businesses. We're really doing some pretty exciting things beyond fixing phones and we can't wait for everyone to see what's next with our technologies.

<comment><USER14> Use more buzzwords, please.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the chuckle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What I want to know: Why can't these phones use plastic screens? Good acrylic is more clear than glass, lighter, safer, more durable. I wouldn't be shocked if iPhones were designed to shatter easily.

I'm seriously thinking of switching back to my ancient Blackberry: plastic screen that doesn't crack, battery lasts a week, make calls by pressing one button, I can turn it off and on easily...

<comment><USER17> The capacitive technology that powers multitouch screens requires (or works much better with) glass, I believe. Also, LCD technology itself requires glass. The less and thinner the layers, the closer it feels like your finger gets to the image, and the better the UX is. There are iPhone cases that essentially do what you are suggesting with a plastic overlay.

<comment><USER18> Citation needed - from what I've experienced most older Android devices have plastic screens and multitouch works fine, and they don't break when dropped.

If there are glass layers in there somewhere, maybe they're somehow protected by the plastic. Or maybe the all-out antiscratch optimized glass in iDevices is just much more brittle than regular glass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You can always make money out of broken stuffs/junks/trash. With the right idea, skill,and marketing; people can earn millions like these guys did.

<comment><USER20> Haha, still working on the millions part. We're launching an insurance company, buyback, and redistribution in the next 6 months so we're really excited about that.

Thanks for the comments, good and bad :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I loved his smile when asked why he is building the company...it made it seem like he wanted to say "Because I can make a lot of money with it", but luckily he chose the right answer of framing who his service is helping. Really great execution there!

</comment><comment><USER22> My iPhone screen is cracked. Do I really have to give up my contact info just to find out how much it costs to fix it with this service? Or did I just miss pricing on the mobile site somehow?

<comment><USER13> Prices vary from iTech to iTech so we need a bit of information to connect you with an iTech to find out the price for their services.

If you're interested, we also have mail-in and DIY services that you can check out on our shop here:

[http://shop.icracked.com](http://shop.icracked.com)

<comment><USER15> FWIW's I think your story and brand is much more powerful if it's the same price no matter where and when. Maybe it's tough to make it comparable between Manhattan and small town USA (where the expectation around the labor cost is dramatically different) but if you could somehow pull it off I think it would be good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can't apple just add some more DRM into the screen, which would then allow apple to simply take over the market that Forsythe have built up?

</comment><comment><USER24> Where does iCracked get the displays/glass? What's to prevent Apple from drying up the supply?

<comment><USER25> The glass on the devices appears to be "generic", not really "apple glass". They manufacture them in China. This is a great article on them; [http://www.inc.com/30under30/burt-helm/icracked-aj- forsythe-...](http://www.inc.com/30under30/burt-helm/icracked-aj-forsythe- anthony-martin-2013.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have a friend that started doing this years ago for iPods and is still going for all apple's iOS devices. I used to do a lot of his web work back in my uni days. [http://www.iphonerepairs.co.uk/](http://www.iphonerepairs.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Hmmm. I googled, found a college kid nearby, met him at Subway and he did my (4) in 30 minutes for $75. 3 months later no issues. Maybe the 4 is meaningfully cheaper?

<comment><USER27> Yes, the iCracked iPhone 4 screen repair usually runs around $80 with a 99 Year Part Warranty. iPhone 5 Parts are more costly right now and thus the repair cost is higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is really neat. I really appreciated the point that he made about "empowering people to take control of their financial futures".

</comment><comment><USER29> This could work. I met a college senior few weeks ago and he talked to me about how he recently started a small venture with a similar tech background but a different business model, that is, buying broken phones for cheap, repairing them and selling refurbished at much better price. His volumes made no sense to me then. Now I see the big picture.

</comment><comment><USER30> Phone repair and insurance is a huge business. This seems alright. A intelligent consumer can find a deal better than 200$, but convenience is the more important to a lot a people. Some people don't care how expensive it is, they need their phone the next day.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's pretty easy to do. My sister just gave me her old cracked iPhone 4 because she thought it was worthless. It still worked fine, but I fixed the screen for about $30 and a few hours of sweaty-palm dis/assembly. Works perfectly now.

<comment><USER32> i believe iphone 4s and 5 have welded glass or something making it much harder to replace alone. as a result usually they replace lcd+glass which make it much more expensive.

<comment><USER33> You can generally buy the digitizer + lcd on ebay for about 30 bucks. It's a lot of small screws, but really not too difficult to swap out. Took me about 45 minutes.

<comment> m-r-a-m For any phone I would recommend buying the digitizer/lcd combined. It's such a pain to separate the two (on phones where it's even possible) and only slightly more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've tried a couple times to have a repair through icracked but never got a reply from them. Always got a message that said 3-5 techs were notified, but I guess they didn't want to repair my cracked iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER35> i am not saying it will happen, but apple could put them out of business in an instant...

<comment><USER15> That's pretty much true of any body in the Apple ecosystem though should they take a direct interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It is depressing that it is news that there is money in fixing popular things.

<comment><USER37> Indeed. Throw-away society, bad for the environment.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Stupid title. Should've been "cracked iPhone displays". I read "cracked iPhone" synonymous with "jailbreaked iPhone".

Also, nicely written press release.

<comment><USER39> You could have made the same point without saying "Stupid title".

<comment><USER40> But then we would be less correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Pick a fatal design flaw in popular product, such as fragile display in iPhone. Build up a repair service around that flaw.

If I invented a similar get-rich-quick-scheme I might also grin like a trollface and that guy in the video.</comment>


Feenbox, RSS reader on your email - <AUTHOR> http://feenbox.com/

<comment><USER2> As an old-school UNIX user, I recommend feed2imap -([http://home.gna.org/feed2imap/](http://home.gna.org/feed2imap/)) which does the same thing.</comment>


Review Me: Speaker Wiki, the encyclopedia of speakers - <AUTHOR> http://speakerwiki.org

<comment><USER2> <http://speakerwiki.org/speakers/Sarah_Palin>

Rating on the right made my eyebrow raise. Shouldn't there be a "No Rating yet" or something like that?

</comment><comment><USER3> Ahhhh, that was disappointing. Here I was expecting some good audiophile pr0n, and find Larry Csonka and Bruce Jenner.

<comment><USER3> Ok, despite my earlier dismissal, this is kind of interesting. Has anyone here hired a speaker that demands these sorts of fees? Are these realistic, or are these their "negotiations start here" prices? I can't reasonably see paying Jeff Dunham the same amount as Alan Greenspan, for instance... how much do these folks actually get in reality?</comment></comment>


AI-Based Optimization of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions for the Covid Pandemic - <AUTHOR> The dashboard demonstrates how Evolutionary AI could be used to model the potential effects of non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) strategies to contain and mitigate the pandemic.  The predictor is trained with historical data on the number of cases and the NPIs over time in various countries, i.e. restrictions on schools and workplaces, public events and gatherings, and transportation. A Pareto front of Prescriptors is then evolved to discover the best tradeoffs between minimizing cases and restrictions.  To illustrate this principle, the site includes an interactive demo: you can explore how, given your preferred tradeoff, the pandemic could be contained and mitigated in different countries.<p>See the demo here: https://evolution.ml/esp/npi/ Download the full paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.13766 <comment><USER2> It has been interesting to follow the prescriptions of this demo in the past few weeks. In May, the system was prescribing less stringent NPIs that it nevertheless predicted to contain the pandemic. Now its recommendations are much more stringent---apparently it has learned that people no longer adher to the NPIs the way they used to! This indeed seems to be the case, anecdotally and based on news media, but it is interesting that the AI learned it on its on from the data.

<comment><USER3> Nice thing is, now that this data exists, the models should never need to rediscover this relaxed adherence phenomenon, e.g., moving forward with covid, or for the next pandemic.</comment></comment>


Amateur Mapmakers Redraw Boundaries, Working Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/nyregion/amateur-mapmakers-reshape-new-york-neighborhoods-online.html?hpw&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> > _"I can tell you, growing up there, I never heard that," he said. Mr. Hersh > suggested that an enterprising broker had simply decided the area needed a > better name than what he used to call it: "Next to the sewage plant."_

Ok, I don't know it this is real or not, but it sounds exactly like this: Dowisetrepla: Downwind of the sewage treatment plant. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowisetrepla>)</comment>


Keeping watch: How Pebble uses Keen IO's analytics - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/05/30/keeping-watch-pebble-uses-keen-ios-analytics-track-buy-use-smartwatch/

<comment><USER2> Been super impressed with Keen, their analytics platform is the right level of abstraction and control, very impressive and not surprising that companies like pebble are using them in a big way.</comment>


Is the homepage button dead?  - <AUTHOR>

does this happens to you too? or am i the only one who clicks on the homepage button just for curiosity. I never use it.   I was surprised to see i had cnnmoney.com as my home page. I usually go straight to the adress bar and type gmail.com <comment><USER2> I have Firefox reopen the last tabs I had open. Great feature. I don't think I can go back to having the browser open up blank or to a default homepage anymore.

<comment><USER3> I hate that feature. I would just dislike it and ignore it, but Firefox seems to think I should love it, so it's always trying to convince me to turn it back on one way or another. I think I've finally got it off everywhere, but I know it's going to start arguing with me about its precious session manager again on some new version or computer.

As for the home button, its been dead since browsers got search boxes for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a home page, full of useful (to me) links and kept under version control. But I always get rid of the homepage button --- it's a waste of pixels.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think so. I sometimes click it by mistake and then regret. :P

</comment><comment><USER6> It's been dead for a long time now.

</comment><comment><USER7> Google.com is my homepage in Chrome and it has a convenient link to gmail which allows me to click to go there instead of typing. Much more convenient. Then when I open a new tab, I get a page with some of my most used sites showing. (BTW: They stole the idea of having little pics as the menu from me -- I swear I had it first but never managed to implement it! :-P)</comment>


Ask HN: New job is frustrating – Handcrafted DevOps - <AUTHOR> I joined a midsize public company as a DevOps Engineer few months ago and unfortunately it's not working out well. I was given an impression that I will be doing automation work with internal virtualization environment, AWS, Jenkins, Puppet etc. In reality, the infrastructure is a mess and managers don't have any idea about implementing DevOps. Management thinks supporting developer collaboration/productivity tools like Gitlab/Atlassian suite/Slack is DevOps. Even these systems are handcrafted using common root password and no one seems to care.
* It takes 1-2 days to provision a new VM because VMs are provisioned by another IT department
 * No systems are under configuration management and there doesn't seem any strong desire to do that in near future. "It's  one time change, let's not automate" seems to be the approach
 * Everyone knows and uses standard 'root' password and custom passwords are written on wiki
 * Obviously no one knows how a system was configured and hence snapshots are preferred way of backing out any changes
It's frustrating to me as previously I've worked with people having good DevOps mindset and we managed hundreds of production systems really well .  Here it's all about emailing strangers and scheduling meetings to figure out stupid issues etc.
I need to pay my bills and this job is offering better pay and willing to sponsor my green card. But it's frustrating..:( As my visa is expiring in a 15 months, I am not sure if it will be practical to switch my job now.
How do I convince managers or seniors to focus on automation and monitoring tools? They are willing to throw money at commercial solutions like SumoLogic, Splunk, NewRelic, VMware, Cisco UCS etc., but don't understand the real problem that is within the organization. Senior managers and CEO doesn't seem to care about these things as revenues are going great.
Sorry for the rant, but I wanted to vent out my frustration. <comment><USER2> > How do I convince managers or seniors to focus on automation and monitoring > tools?

By providing solutions. You don't sound like you're busy doing stuff all the time so you can spend the time you are waiting for a meeting just doing things. Find a few low hanging fruits where you can make life for others easier, preferably things that save them time. Over time you build a reputation and people will start to actually listen to what you say. Until then, don't talk, just do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for suggestion. I've tried that few times (configured staging hosts in minutes using Ansible which saved time for me at least), but other folks were not interested. Hopefully I can find things that other people do frequently by hand.

<comment><USER3> Changing culture is not an easy task, but can be very rewarding. If you can work on those solutions that save X dollars or time, and can show the value that solution brings, people will start to buy into what you're selling.

Goodluck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There were sysadmins doing automation before people invented DevOps, and they had similar challenges: finding time for "projects" in between fixing the printer. A good book on this is Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli. It's short and humorous and might give you some ideas. I don't think you're going to change the organization, but you might be able to improve things here and there and get more personal satisfaction from your work.

Maybe also find out who wrote that job description. Perhaps you can make a case that you were given a mandate to push the organization toward better practices. But in that case perhaps you should also ask for a promotion, because it doesn't sound like you have the authority to make the changes you'd like.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes you just have to sit back and enjoy the ride (and get your green card).

I would work on automating what you can to save yourself time. Be on the look out for easy things that can save other time and present proposals to implement X and save Y time.

I'm been in companies though where for whatever reason no one wants to change/improve anything. Some fear automating things saving time will cost them their job or they might not understand/not want to learn new things. So they are never going to be open to change.

Be on guard for things going wrong and being blamed for trying new things. Learn that they are doing inside and out, then look at ways your team can do it better.

If you just settle in and keep doing what you're doing take some time to learn new techniques and technologies that can help you later. Maybe start a blog, writing to build an audience to make you an 'expert' and open up possible product offerings in the future. (If that interests you).

Good luck, some companies are never going to do things the 'right' way. Good luck passing along some best practices.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fundamentally, work for their problems, not yours, to solve your problem.

Log patterns and avoid premature automation, but write down the time you and others take to fix issues and then you can say that technical debt because of blank cost the company X days this last Y period.

Also work on projects that showcase you can get shit done to build up credibility. Everyone who comes in as a junior engineer with different ideas will come across as the hot shot who thinks he knows better. Reach out to the developers and ask them what are areas where automation would make their job easier. Reach out to management and ask them what they want more control over, or want done quicker through automation. Look for other costs, server costs, service costs, etc.

Your frustration likely matters to nobody but yourself though. Find their frustrations and fix both simultaneously.</comment>


How to make Slack handle hundreds of thousands of messages without lag - alex-e https://eul.im/slack <comment><AUTHOR> Stop deleting and resubmitting this.

You already did a Show HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14778263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14778263)</comment>


Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community? - <AUTHOR> Note: Here, when I say "community," I really mean "online community."
To me, the most puzzling thing about programming is that there is no real place to actually discuss programming.
As weird/absurd as that sounds, it seems like three major avenues where most discussion occurs are:
1. Reddit. Subreddits are nice and very effectively organize discussion of different topics. On the other hand, Reddit is virtually anonymous, and it's generally frowned upon to share anything of your own creation, in order to not be flagged as spam/self-promotion.
2. Hacker News. It's more than acceptable to submit your own content, or other people's content you found interesting. The downside is that it's very difficult to get to the frontpage, and most posts not on the frontpage are forgotten. There's also the fact that this site is far more anonymous than Reddit, and that features like downvoting are blocked off for most users.
3. Twitter. I like Twitter because it's very personal, and you can actually put faces to names (unheard of elsewhere). The downside here is that for anyone to hear anything you're saying, you truly have to have tens of thousands of followers. I have 4,000, but most of those people are not programmers, and thus there's less than a smidgeon of opportunity for any sort of programming discussion there.
So, I've always wondered.
Is the reason that there is no real online community, the fact that maybe we just don't need one?
Thoughts? Just wanted to discuss... <comment><USER2> > To me, the most puzzling thing about programming is that there is no real > place to actually discuss programming.

There totally are. Forums, chatrooms, mailing lists - they tend to be more niche than simply "programming", because that's simply such a huge topic... you can find better, if more niche, common ground. You don't have "the drinking" community - you have coffee lovers, the wine testers, microbrewers, etc.

I spent long enough on gamedev.net and it's associated chat channels (first IRC, now Discord too) for my relationships with people online to bleed out into the real world. It taught me a ton about programming. It got me my first industry job offer, from someone who I helped teach. In passing, I've seen various FOSS communities, programming languages, etc. - often focused strictly on shop talk, but not always.

There's a lot of pseudonymity to be sure, and you'll get pushback if the first thing out of your mouth is "hey check out my game/project/community, email me because I'm not sticking around long enough to hear any feedback here" \- which happens surprisingly often - but there's plenty people can share relating to their projects, the tech they're using, or having trouble with, or finding new and interesting ways to (ab)use - even from the get go, that can be well received.

It's the difference between finding a topic of shared interest to discuss, vs broadcasting a topic of just _your_ interest to talk at people with. The latter isn't a discussion.

</comment><comment><USER3> People use the word community in such false ways. I've heard phrases like "the pancake eating community" and so on. People who eat pancakes aren't a community. Your community consists of the people who will let you stay at their house if yours floods. Or the people who will come and get you if your car breaks down. That's a community.

<comment><USER4> > if yours floods

Increasingly in the west local communities are weakened, and these tasks are taken up by government services. That's why online communities thrive: they allow people who are dispersed all over the place to coordinate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Once you get to the scale of "all programming" perhaps there is not so much shared culture or knowledge to bind a single community together. This might be related to the way communities of practice organise at different scales, rather than something specific about programming. (Compare: Why is there no real on-line piano-playing community?)

A related question is: why are developer communities balkanized by programming language, application domain, programming paradigm, educational background? In part this is tribalism. Often corporations take advantage of this tendency to gain market advantage, which amplifies the effect.

Finally, why should there be a single, unified, online community? There are _many_ online communities of programmers and that seems to be working pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER6> I see programmers discussing all over, for example in Github Issues, or Stackoverflow. Always topic based discussions, obviously. They lack the social interaction and freedom to think more broadly about programming and solutions, though. Is that what you are talking about? Edit: grammar

<comment><USER7> Github is pretty diffuse to count much as a community, though there are aspects of community about it.

Stackoverflow and kin are very focused on specific questions and are elitist. I've participated for years and find that I cannot add my comments because I don't have sufficient points. And DO NOT post a stupid question or someone will suggest you delete it. (I'm of the opinion that there are no stupid questions but I do see the occasional stupid answer.)

The communities I see are a bit more general than programming. A good example is the Raspberry Pi community. Many of their discussions involve programming but more generally are "how do I do XXX." That community is also fostered by the folks who bring us the RPi.

Some of the more recent languages like Rust and Go seem to be fostering too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what you mean by 'discuss programming'. Do you mean a place where you can post a tangential comment on the topic, or crack a joke unrelated to the topic, or repeat what others might have said 10 pages back? There are many phpboard like forums dedicated for games, linux etc which are of this nature.

For a more controlled kind of discussions, the current preeminent site for such activity is stackexchange. Sure, it has its flaws - its strictly qna style, is filled with elitist and intolerant mods - but for most questions that are not of the form "how to do X with API Y on platform Z", you will find discussion in comments. Even on stackoverflow which primarily encourages questions of the above form, there are enough discussions. The softwareenginering site is much better for slightly opinionated discussions disguised as questions and answers; so are workplace, unix etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is your opinion about: Lambda the Ultimate [http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/](http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Stackoverflow? It's a real place to discuss programming. Discussions spans across years, and not limited to solving a particular technical problem, there are questions about general concept clarifications. Plus there are also github repos where relevant code is discussed directly.

</comment><comment><USER11> On the contrary, there are lots of different programming communities. They represent different areas of interest, levels of knowledge, experience.

I cannot see how we could have a "single community" that is equally relevant to CS researchers and newbie programmers and all the other variations in between.

To take your example of "discussing programming", Lambda the Ultimate comes to mind. But even there how could reconcile the "conversations" of JavaScript hackers and Haskell gurus?

</comment><comment><USER12> Hidifferent.com is a website to share knowledge and learn about different cultures. I'm still working on it, :)

I've created some programming communities, for example: [https://hidifferent.com/clojure](https://hidifferent.com/clojure) [https://hidifferent.com/rust](https://hidifferent.com/rust) [https://hidifferent.com/ocaml](https://hidifferent.com/ocaml)

It supports sub channels and anyone can create public or invite-only communities.

</comment><comment><USER13> The most comprehensive discussion community has got to be Github. Real people commenting on real issues that crop up in specific software problems.

Probably the second largest community Stack Overflow. Real people commenting on real issues that crop up general programming problems.

Twitter is mostly bots or journalists talking about speculative technology problems that rarely crop in practical programming careers (no, I don't need 240 character advice on how to shut down skynet).

</comment><comment><USER14> There is. IRC and it has been around for decades. Freenet.

<comment><AUTHOR> I could argue against IRC (and other chat rooms) that they're typically small and hard-to-discover.

There's also the fact that programming chat rooms quickly devolve into "please do my homework." At least, in my experience.

I could be wrong, though.

<comment><USER2> > I could argue against IRC (and other chat rooms) that they're typically > small and hard-to-discover.

Size varies. I'm idling in Mozilla's #rust and that has 1390 people in it alone. And small communities are still communities, I'd argue as well!

> There's also the fact that programming chat rooms quickly devolve into > "please do my homework." At least, in my experience.

There will always be (attempted) freeloaders in any community. How they're handled varies - I've been in several with explicit no-homework policies, where the community _will_ give you grief if you didn't even try to google, strongly steering people towards developing their ability to help themselves rather than relying on handouts. "Teach a man to fish" etc.

Which isn't to say people won't still try, but it can be managed and policed.

Even there, people will generally help out when someone encounters a totally strange/niche/not easily understood or explained edge case, if only to better understand it for themselves, or to spend a minute to save another person hours. But that's a win/win as far as I'm concerned - not much of a community IMO if you're not willing to do that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is one at least now and it's on IRC!

[http://dailyprog.org/chat/](http://dailyprog.org/chat/)

</comment><comment><USER16> What is a community for a different topic comparable to what you would like/expect to exist for programming?

</comment><comment><USER17> What would you like to discuss in such a forum?

I suspect the answer is that if many (enough) others do too, it does already exist.

</comment><comment><USER18> Because programming, although a subset of IT, is very broad. There are a lot of communities, not just a single one. I personnaly LOVE stackoverflow, Joel is my HERO, but it is more of a question and answer forum. CodeProject is more of a community, and might fit your needs.

</comment><comment><USER19> There are communities just like what you describe on Gitter in the rooms for particular programming languages

</comment><comment><USER20> Yep, let forums comes back. They died mostly because phpBB was an absolute mess.

<comment><USER21> >They died mostly because phpBB was an absolute mess

They died mostly because Reddit and Facebook made them obsolete.

They won't come back at least until people stop losing their heads over GDPR compliance, although maybe self-hosted forums will come back with a general push towards strong anonymity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you can't find a service that provides what you are referring to, build something new. Create a 4chan for programming or something terrible and work really hard on it til you are proud of it.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's the functional programming Discord server here with a few thousand users: [https://discord.me/fp](https://discord.me/fp)

</comment><comment><USER24> Good question. I think you mean "Why is there no online programming discussion forum"?

</comment><comment><USER25> No one is mentioning DevRant...

</comment><comment><USER26> Mastodon.technology has a super nerdy and fun community. I highly recommend it!

</comment><comment><USER27> There's StackOverflow for you.</comment>


How One Quantum Particle Can Send Messages to Itself - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a18675995/how-one-quantum-particle-can-send-and-receive-messages-to-itself/ <comment><USER2> Horrible title, bad press coverage. For a better press repost of the same paper see "Two-Way Communication Is Possible with a Single Quantum Particle (sciencenews.org)" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16446782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16446782)</comment>


HuffPo: Violence Against Trump Is Logical - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-benn/sorry-liberals-a-violent-_b_10316186.html <comment><USER2> This doesn't seem very well put into a single thing to me.

a paragraph by paragraph summary, which will be followed by why I disagree:

[summary starts here]

Trump is bad because he encourages oppression. People react to this in some ways that are not violent, and in some ways that are violent. "This isn't a coincidence."

Trump has incited violence, and his supporters have been violent in oppression flavored ways. Trump defies the norms of politics in a bad way, and groups try to make it seem like it is normal politics. Because Trump has encouraged violence, and violated norms of political discourse, it should not be surprising that people respond "in kind". Even if you think using violence is bad, you should agree that normalizing trump is bad. Violence reduced normalizing trump. Apparently liberals think that using violence is somehow worse than the bad things trump is doing / the normalization of trump.

Some people are saying that using violence to go against trump being normalized is bad, and people who say that it is good are criticized/punished. The people saying that it is bad are wrong because they blame the people responding with violence instead of the thing that the people being violent are responding to, they misunderstand the purpose of the violence, and they are like young children who don't know that sometimes violence is better than nonviolence for accomplishing things. [i.e. they are stupid/uneducated/childish for thinking that]

For the first part of that, it is ok to use violence because trump is moving the Overton Window, and is generally radically bad. Treating trumpishness like something that should be responded to in a way that respects norms in politics causes it to be more accepted as being a legitimate political viewpoint. This is unlike Cruz, who is also very bad, but is bad in a normal way.

Politicians and "liberals" act like the goal in resisting trump is to make trump not be elected president, but the real goal is to make it so the ideals associated with trump (trumpishness) do not become politically accepted as normal.

Trump is a result of republicans supporting oppression, and also "attacking the credibility of media, scientists, and the federal government". Stopping these systems of oppression is more long term than preventing trump from being elected. We can see why violence is useful in anti-fascism things from its usefulness in Europe as part of anti-fascism things.

Third, violence is useful because it helped reduce oppression in the past, as can be seen from a list of examples. [list not included in this summary] Fascism wasn't stopped in Europe because people elected a non-fascist but because other countries defeated the fascist countries in war. Also Hillary is a market centrist.

It is "problematic" for "people with privilege" to say that the use of violence to oppose trumpishness is wrong or illogical. Whether you would use violence doesn't impact your ability to understand justifications for it. Privileged people who argue that using violence is bad are oppressing those people who are too oppressed to be able to afford to determine if something other than violence would be enough to protect them.

[end of summary]

tl;dr: Author of article is a Marxist. Says that its fine for violence against trumpishness because oppression.

(note: I tried to be relatively fair in my summary, but because I disagree with the article, I cannot really be wholly objective about what it is saying, so if you are reading my summary instead of the article, bear that in mind I guess. Quotes are indicating that I am using the same wording in the summary as the article uses. Things in brackets are side notes.)

Worse than that, they are a Marxist that didn't even bother to put the things they were saying together. The main part where they make any sort of argument to attempt to morally justify the use of violence is just in the last paragraph. The rest of it mostly only argues that violence is useful. Well /duh!/ it is "useful"! Why do they think people use it? There are ends it can accomplish. When people are saying that violence is bad unless certain conditions are met, they aren't saying that it can't accomplish ends. They are saying it is wrong or bad.

OK but really, look over the paragraphs or my summaries of the paragraphs, and see which ones actually make points that the article uses to support its claim and which actually connects them to it.

It makes some attempt to make the reader more sympathetic to using violence to oppose trumpishness by pointing out the violence used by proponents of trump/trumpishness, but it does not actually say that this is a justification. Just that it is not surprising, or things like that. ( Seems like moral relativist / nihilist stuff. Moral relativism and moral nihilism can both go fall down a well.)

Now, some of the things that they say seem like good points, but none of these are things that actually justify using violence for a political cause.

It is true that trumpishness seems to reflect a cause or change in the overton window in a harmful direction.

But the thing about political norms of discourse, is that each group generally views its opponents views as being harmful! If everyone considered an opposing view being harmful to be sufficient to justify violence, then all groups would consider violence against all of their opponents to be justified! That would make for either a very violent political setting, or a setting where one group is sufficiently dominant, and likely not because that group is the one that is most correct.

I have already said that violence being "useful" is not enough to justify it.

The article is full of things along the lines of "even if you personally would not use violence [...] ". This reeks, or at least smells, of moral relativism. Moral relativism can go fall down a well.

Use of violence in a particular situation is either justified or it is not. If it is not justified in a certain situation, it does not matter if one "does not have the privilege to consider" whether violence is permissible. It either is or it isn't.

Further, if someone truly could not take the time, or whatever resource the author supposes they lack, to consider whether violence is justified, what possible harm would there be in someone else arguing that it is not justified? Either the oppressed person cannot consider the argument, and the argument has no bearing on them, or they can, and therefore they can consider it after all. I suppose the idea might be that the line of reasoning would cause other people to treat them in a harmful way, but, which people would do that? Who are the people who would be treating someone badly because they disaprove of that person's use of political violence? If it would be some large organization such as the police, or perhaps their boss at their work, I don't think that even the opposite argument instead of the one argument would cause these institutions to treat the person differently. Otherwise, what is the impact? If it is not the impact, is the author claiming that arguing against violence is inherently wrong even if it has no practical consequences? Surely this is not what they mean.

tl;dr2:

Author barely makes any arguments towards their point, the one they make are not any good. Author seems to define ethics based on oppression vs oppressed, etc.</comment>


The Absolutely True Story of a Real Programmer Who Never Learned C - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@wilshipley/the-absolutely-true-story-of-a-real-programmer-who-never-learned-c-210e43a1498b#.8vw9jyjry <comment><USER2> He did learn C. In the process of inventing it. But still learned it.

And I always translated "Real programmers know C" as "Real programmers know their stack, and know there is no way to really abstract away thak pesky physical stuff"

</comment><comment><USER3> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11100364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11100364)</comment>


Bad Stat Is Their Product - <AUTHOR> https://errorstatistics.com/2020/02/13/bad-statistics-is-their-product-fighting-fire-with-fire/ <comment><AUTHOR> Why I attended a conference on "Fixing Science"sponsored by the National Association of Scholars.</comment>


Ask HN: Startup CEO or algorithmic trader, which has more money? - <AUTHOR>

For someone with a degree in CS: Is a startup CEO more likely to make more money? Or is an algorithmic trader more likely to make more money?<p>(http://www.quora.com/For-someone-with-a-degree-in-CS-Is-a-startup-CEO-more-likely-to-make-more-money-Or-is-an-algorithmic-trader-more-likely-to-make-more-money?share=1) <comment><USER2> The answer is very much "it depends". I work in the electronic trading industry and have for ~6.5 years.

If your math skills are very good and you want to work as hard as you would as a CEO in an early stage startup, your pretty much guaranteed to make a LOT more money in finance. Ditto if your solely a quant and not a trader or a quant/trader.

That being said, if your startup makes a glorified text messaging program that Facebook buys for a cool billion $$$, you'll be sitting pretty. Statistically, you're much more likely to succeed and make a lot of money in finance. Each company is different, but many firms let traders keep 3-6% of their PnL as end of year bonuses. Extremely good compensation is the name of the game in finance, but in a startup it is like playing roulette. Your wins can be a lot bigger, but so can your losses.

If it was me, I'd go finance, but I'm a technologist at heart and absolutely love the tech I'm able to work on with the tech budget of a solid financial firm.

<comment><USER3> Do you mind expanding on what exactly you do?(in an anonymous fashion if necessary) As someone currently looking for a career this sounds intriguing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most startups fail. Therefore the average earnings of a startup founder is near zero.</comment>


Show HN: Yet another "Pocket to Kindle" service - <AUTHOR> https://pocket2kindle.petprojects.space <comment><USER2> Not working :( I have an error after link at pocket

<comment><AUTHOR> :( Try again, please. UPD: I found a problem :)</comment></comment>


Paul Hudak Succumbs to Cancer - <AUTHOR> http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/04/30/hudak-spirited-saybrugian-and-cs-prof-succumbs-to-cancer/

<comment><USER2> The main discussion of Paul Hudak can be found in this article on the front page:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9465999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9465999)

However, this article contains much more detail than the article linked to that earlier post.</comment>


A billion thanks to the open source community from Red Hat - <AUTHOR> http://opensource.com/business/12/3/billion-thanks-open-source-community-red-hat <comment><USER2> I'm seeing a lot of comments that equate to nitpicking over how little RH is giving back to the community.

Despite how uninformed I might consider that opinion to be, given how many open source developers are on payroll, and how many projects get many of their patches from RH, the other little thing that RH has done was effectively legitimize Linux as a sellable resource.

Without the RedHat sales team getting RH in the doors of enterprises around the world, Linux would be significantly further back in terms of performance, compatibility, scalability, etc.

<comment><USER3> I used RH and liked it in the 90s, but since then I don't see why a RHEL-based distribution for server isn't a good enough option. I understand that is just being parasitic, but it is free after all- why pay for it? So, I think Linux is strong and will be strong with or without RH. Sure it's great that they provide a major paid option for customers that feel like they have to pay something, but I don't respect any tech company that pays for Linux because they feel they need to just to have the support. If they like the distribution and want to support them, fine. But, don't do it because you feel that you have to have support.

Also, I interviewed for RH several years ago and was not impressed. Their employees seemed fairly unmotivated, and despite the number of people I interviewed with, it didn't seem very well thought out. I didn't like their distro at that point, so it was a bad idea in hindsight to interview with them. I just didn't believe in RH anymore, and going there only solidified that.

<comment><USER2> Ironically enough, that is exactly the reason most people buy it. However, I believe you underestimate the criticality of support.

If you're a tech-savvy startup, then sure, you just put a few guys on staff, but if you are most other kinds of businesses, then you'll employ some 'good- enough' administrators for the day to day operations, but you won't be able to necessarily employ a full team for something that isn't core to your business.

Another common scenario is in government, or large companies. Especially in government, we, as tax-payers, would consider it wasteful if the gov were hiring top notch tech engineers to maintain their file shares and directory servers. They are also completely unwilling to put a system in place with a company that not only will be available for same-day support on critical systems, but will also have to be relatively certain that company will be around in 10 years when they are still running those systems.

In short, support is probably more important than you're giving it credit for, but even for customers where it isn't, RH's credibility has opened the doors for every other Linux distribution and their ability to do work inside the Enterprise.

<comment><USER4> Personally I would be delighted if the government hired (as in permanent, not by the hour) top-notch tech engineers to maintain their IT infra. It would most likely cut down IT costs enormously while at the same time making things running a lot smoother ...

<comment><USER2> Government work would just infuriate any top-notch engineers by moving too slow.

Simple changes move slowly, and hard changes take forever. Naturally, it isn't a limitation of the equipment, but the bureaucracy in place.

I've been involved with projects where, after having already spent money on hardware and software procurement and over 3 months worth of man hours on actual implementation, the project stopped because a DNS change request form was filled out incorrectly. Correcting the form and getting it reapproved took four weeks to correct what was literally a one character correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good for them, and nice that they are contributing a bit of their profits.

There are a few negative comments here, and it is cool for everyone to have their say. In response, I would like to say that Red Hat supports some projects like Hibernate, JBoss, etc. that are useful and help me earn my living as a consultant - so thanks to them for that.

</comment><comment><USER6> To add a little perspective since people seem to be losing their heads at "one billion dollars!", their annual GAAP net income was only $146.6 million. [1] How much did omgpop get bought for again? Anyway, congrats RedHat. Who knows where Linux and FLOSS in general would be without them. I tip my...(•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■) hat to them.

[1] [http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2012/3/red- ha...](http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2012/3/red-hat-reports- fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2012-results)

<comment><USER7> How is equating and/or confusing revenue, profit and market capitalization in the space of a two-sentence post "adding perspective"?

Clearly Red Hat isn't going to be the next Apple (or even IBM, to whom they have a closer business model). But I'd be shocked beyond belief if Draw Something does a billion in revenue this year.

<comment><USER8> _> But I'd be shocked beyond belief if Draw Something does a billion in revenue this year._

I think that was Jach's point: that omgpop was overvalued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks, Red Hat, for the donation. It is a gesture, but an important one. I can appreciate treading the fine line of meeting market (ie, Wall Street) is demanding and keeping alive the ethos of the open source mantra at the same time is challenging. You've hired open source developers and people who's passion is in writing code and doing it well. I remember how Red Hat offered shares when they IPOed (<http://tech.mit.edu/V119/N30/30redhat.30n.html>) to open source developers. Red Hat did not have to, but they did.

So, thanks for doing this. It _does_ mean a lot.

</comment><comment><USER10> A more accurate title might be "100,000 thanks to the open source community from Red Hat."

</comment><comment><USER11> This might be nitpicking, but them donating only $100k (even if its to each) still seems paltry in my opinion. You hit a billion, donate a full million bucks!

</comment><comment><USER12> Okay, does anyone else have the unfortunate problem of automatic numeracy?

After a lot of physics tests, basically comparing numbers and subtracting exponents is something I do almost automatically. Like, I enjoy that they're donating at all, and I know that their staff often contribute in the form of patches and commits -- really one of the key ways contributions _should_ go -- but somehow the numbers seemed a little dramatically understated. They're literally saying, "Free software made us billionaires, so we're paying them a 0.01% commission." It just sounds like, "I earned $4 000 from homeless people and then gave four of them each a dime."

I mean, I'm sure you made their lives better and helped them to help you, but still, the gap between the numbers is a little startling. ^_^

<comment><USER13> I guess there's just no pleasing some people.

RedHat aren't obligated to donate anything to anybody.

They could even take the Apple KHTML/Webkit approach and make it difficult to incorporate their code changes back into the original code bases.

If anybody releasing open source code feels cheated by this it's their own fault for choosing to release code using an open source license.

<comment><USER14> I'm generally supportive of RedHat, and think they do pretty well by the open- source community. But I don't agree with the latter part of your comment on principle: not everything that is _legal_ is a good idea or something we should cheer. I think there is a general ethical requirement to give something back to people who got you where you are, even if you aren't legally obligated to do so. (And RedHat does in fact do so.)

Things actually work better in the case where there's an ethical but not legally codified understanding, imo, enforced informally through community pressure rather than lawsuits. If you try to add it into legal obligations, complex licenses start piling up; the old BSD advertising clause, for example, was an attempt to turn the ethical principle of "you should prominently acknowledge the work you built on" into a legally enforceable license, which in retrospect most people agree was misguided. But you should still prominently acknowledge the work you built on, anyway, and it's fair to call people out on it if they aren't giving sufficient credit. You can't _sue_ people who don't give sufficient credit (past the bare minimum copyright statement), but you can criticize them and apply community pressure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting that none of the recipients will be actual projects that Red Hat is built upon. No donation to the Linux Kernel, nothing to Gnome, nothing to GNU at all, etc. I think that some people might be upset about that but I view it as extremely forward thinking. These other Free Software supporting organizations provide support to the community in ways that are much more difficult to quantify than simply lines of code. Without them the "free/libre" community would have a much harder time being taken seriously.

<comment><USER16> redhat "donates" to all those project you mentioned in the form of payroll

<comment><USER17> To further clarify this point, if you look at the reports here, you'll find that RedHat is the largest corporate contributor to both the kernel and to gnome:

<http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linux-foundation> <http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/></comment></comment></comment>


The Google Search That Made the CIA Spy on the US Senate - <AUTHOR> https://news.vice.com/article/the-google-search-that-made-the-cia-spy-on-the-us-senate

<comment><USER2> I was expecting to see the NSA spying on the Senate, not the CIA. Maybe this is one of the "shell games" where CIA agents are using NSA equipment and data, and so it's a CIA investigation not an NSA one?

At the risk of sounding too cynical, I'm beginning to expect that every classified document is classified merely to cover up mistakes, bad choices, and other events that would make the person in power look poorly to others.

Do we really benefit - as a nation, or as a society - by classifying documents?

<comment><USER3> It's not an "either the NSA, or the CIA" situation. In this case, the CIA went after the Senate because the Senate was pursuing an investigation into allegations of torture against the CIA.

That said, Sen. Feinstein spoke at Stanford a few months ago, and she aggressively defended the NSA. It was, in my opinion, a very bad speech, with her trust and justification for NSA surveillance was as vague and cartoonish as anything President George W. Bush said during the war on terror. And then at the end of her talk, she went off on a rant about how you can see her house on Google Maps.

[http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/may/feinstein-security- ta...](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/may/feinstein-security- talk-052915.html)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j57OuqbtD9Q&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j57OuqbtD9Q&feature=youtu.be)</comment></comment>


Why ContentEditable is Terrible - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/medium-eng/122d8a40e480

<comment><USER2> For what it's worth, it was ContentEditable that allowed me to read this post via my non-standard viewport

[https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/86985/2975862/9b2...](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/86985/2975862/9b2589ba- db99-11e3-9a50-3dd47b4a2cb6.png)

[https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/86985/2975879/c52...](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/86985/2975879/c5205cd6-db99-11e3-88ce-413ebc5c60f2.png)</comment>


I'm with the Band [Led Zeppelin] (and their Private Jet) - <AUTHOR> http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/07/10/im-with-the-band-on-their-private-jet/

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn. I'd give anything to go back to 1973.</comment>


Dow Jones Shari'ah supervisory board - <AUTHOR> http://www.djindexes.com/islamicmarket/?go=supervisory-board

<comment><AUTHOR> The Siemens pension fund allows employees to self-select:

 _Freestyle gives you the freedom to choose and manage your own mix of investments from the 12 options available.

Shariah

\- Invests consistently with specific aspects of Islamic Law

\- Investments are verified by Islamic scholars who sit on the Dow Jones Shariah Board

\- Excludes investments in companies that profit from arms, alcohol, tobacco and pork (and others)

\- Because of the restrictions in this type of investment, this option may underperform an equivalent option without these restrictions"_

[1] Page 12 of [http://www.siemens.co.uk/pensions/pool/documents/plan%20guid...](http://www.siemens.co.uk/pensions/pool/documents/plan%20guides/IP%20plan%20guides/siemens- investor-plan-guide.pdf)</comment>


Out of control Chinese space station about to fall to Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/tiangong-1-chinese-space-station-falling-to-earth-china-cnsa-nasa-when-date-a7999526.html <comment><AUTHOR> This does feel a little bit like watch a science fiction TV series, or something along these lines.

<comment><USER2> Or going back to 1979 and the fall of Skylab.</comment></comment>


Bad News For Android: ITC Rules HTC Violated Two Apple Patents - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20110715/itc-rules-htc-violated-two-apple-patents/

<comment><USER2> >"They are very likely to be infringed by code that is at the core of Android," says IP expert Florian Mueller.

Now that's what I call a credible, expert source with no history of distorting the issues. Always good to see the balance and perspective that the business media gives to intellectual property issues in software.

<comment><USER3> Agreed and similarly I've seen Nathan Myhrvold, of Intellectual Ventures, on quite a few Sunday morning talk shows with supposed hardball journalists and not a peep about his patent trolling is mentioned.

<comment><USER4> Why was he on Sunday morning talk shows? What were they talking about?

<comment><USER3> Fareed Zakaria had him on for some "Innovation" sermon. He's been included on a few discussions about climate change as well and he's usually labeled at ex- CTO of MSFT, without mention of Intellectual Ventures. I just find it dishonest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm astonished at how broad the patents in question seem to be: [http://www.google.com/patents/about/5946647_System_and_metho...](http://www.google.com/patents/about/5946647_System_and_method_for_performing.html?id=aFEWAAAAEBAJ) and [http://www.google.com/patents?id=nCYJAAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=nCYJAAAAEBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=6,343,263&hl=en&ei=3rUgTojDCtHXiAKxsaTOAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA)

The first one especially seems like it could describe any computer system at all. I guess I am just not smart enough to be a patent lawyer, and I say that with a straight, straight face.

<comment><USER6> The key point of the first one is the popup list with the choices based on the string parsing. I'd guess there would be prior art but it also seems like Android could work around that pretty easily.

<comment><USER7> So, the pairing of Natural Language Processing with generating a popup?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Litigation that attacks open-source products limits consumer choice, hurts the economy, and discourages innovation."

I find this interesting, in a world where software patents exist this seems tantamount to saying "software patents ought not to apply to open-source products", does Google really mean this to be read as "[Patent] litigation ... limits consumer choice, hurts the economy, and discourages innovation", if so, given that they are in a better position to influence legislators than I am, what pro-active steps are they taking to change the status of software patents? Or do they really mean "we don't like it when Apple uses patents against us"?

<comment><USER6> Breaking: company that copied other company's invention in favor of less stringent copying rules.

<comment><USER9> Do people really want someone with Google's revenue stream and internal R&D getting into the aggressive patent game?

<comment><USER6> I don't "want" anything, Google should choose and do what they want. I'm just observing that Google is a company with few patents and are in competition in multiple areas with companies with more patents that they very possibly infringe on. It is therefore no surprise that their view on patent law is incredibly in line with this position.

I believe there's a trend in tech circles to conflate "patents badly need some reforms" with much stronger views along the lines of "patents are pure evil". This is just rubbish. The alternative to patents is massive secrecy on a ridiculous scale.

<comment><USER9> " I'm just observing that Google is a company with few patents and are in competition in multiple areas with companies with more patents that they very possibly infringe on. It is therefore no surprise that their view on patent law is incredibly in line with this position."

It's a given that you can't enter a field without infringing on patents. Therefore the choice is to either not to grow or to infringe on others patents. Every company has to make that choice not just Google. In the current system the best thing Google could do to defend itself would be aggressively patent everything to use as a weapon. For some reason they have chosen not to do that and that hamstrings them.

That gets dangerously close to "patents are pure evil". When a company that chooses not to abuse a government provided weapon is at a major disadvantage and other companies can use the government to damage it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if the headline was so trollish when Apple violated Nokia's patents and settled by paying.

It's actually quite funny to see "media" (blogs included) role in the Mobile Tech reporting - they either troll bait for clicks on both sides or are just supporting their "team" by offense or defense at every opportunity ;)

Speaking of which there was this on Slashdot - [http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/15/1331243/The- Scien...](http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/15/1331243/The-Science- Behind-Fanboyism)

<comment><USER6> Honestly what's wrong with the headline, is this not 'bad news for Android'?

As for how the media works, I think you'll find that selling news with catchy headlines has a long history and is hardly exclusive to the Mobile Tech industry.

<comment><USER10> a) Appeal is pending - the news is not yet final.

b) Patent cross licensing deals aren't that uncommon - Apple is paying Nokia royalties for e.g. without anyone saying it was "bad news" for Apple

c) HTC != Android - I understand the patents are about Android but remember - HTC is also flush with cash, they are appealing and they just bought S3 and Apple violates their patents. Other Android vendors may have enough patent chest of their own to not lose much in the fight.

As far as the media goes - so far those type of media outlets were seeking sensationalism for its own sake or just for making money's sake - taking one "side" and seeking sensationalism in everything that goes for it - that's new as far as I know in tech industry.

<comment><USER6> a) If you're found guilty of murder that's still bad news regardless if you plan to appeal. Analogy not precise here, it's a preliminary finding not a final verdict, overall logic is the same - one side of a case can have all sorts of bad news.

b) Plenty of people said that was bad for Apple, I'm sure Steve Jobs would prefer not to part with those billions of dollars. {There's a minor difference in that it wasn't "bad news" because it was a negotiated settlement, not a revealed finding and thus not "news" to Apple}. At any rate it was widely reported as a victory for Nokia and a loss for Apple.

c) That is disingenuous. HTC (also mentioned in the headline) is not a household name and it is a huge part of Android. This isn't just bad news for HTC, it's arguably worse news for Android because the patents are reportedly fundamental to the OS. If HTC (et al) can't import Android phones or the fees make the cost of it too high they're just going to switch to WP 7.

Media: the media isn't taking sides here, the ITC did and the media is reporting that. What's your perfect headline?

<comment><USER10> How does any of that make sense to you - I am too tired atm to restate the obvious but -

a) Hyperbole - murder cases and patent cases don't compare. Convicted of murder doesn't have any negotiation left - plenty of negotiation is possible in this case as I pointed out - HTC can use S3 patents to offset or even make up for what they might end up paying Apple if they lose the appeal.

b) Patents are sad reality for everyone and anyone who wants to make and sell significant mobile product - Apple, Nokia, Microsoft, Google, HTC - all are at risk which they manage by paying up or making cross patent licensing deals. If it's bad news it is bad for everyone - not just Android. And HTC doesn't seem to be in a particularly bad position here - they got the ITC to invalidate some of Apple's claim and they have a favorable ruling in S3 case which they can use against Apple.

c) See b) - You don't seem to fully grasp the patent scene - whatever it is - bad/worst/ugly - it is the same for everyone. Or are you saying Apple is somehow immune to all this?

<comment><USER6> a) Exchange 'murder' with 'jaywalking' if you like, either way your argument that there can be no bad news because they can appeal is just silly. It doesn't even have to be the verdict -- not getting the juror you wanted, not getting that evidence/testimony/witness in, not getting a continuance, these are all bad news decisions. The fact that you can appeal any of them doesn't change them being bad news.

b) that is your opinion about the overall patent industry but today's specific news is not about general patent industry. It's about this finding by the ITC. It is most certainly good news for Apple and bad news for HTC and Android. Do you think HTC was happy when they heard this? I think they were disappointed to hear this. That is bad news by definition.

c) I think your view is clouded by your Patent Derangement Syndrome. No Apple is not immune to anything, they could benefit or pay horribly like anyone else. When they infringe on people's (valid) patents I believe Apple should pay the appropriate penalty. Conversely when other companies infringe on Apple's (valid) patents I believe they should pay the appropriate penalty. Thirdly patents that should not have been issued (i.e. many of them) should be deemed invalid. What happened today was a preliminary finding that Android maker HTC infringes on several of Apple's patents. There could be worse news but this is unquestionably bad news for HTC and Android.

<comment><USER10> Let's say court ruled Person X stole ThingA from Person Y.

Let's also say court ruled that Person Y also stole from Person X, they stole ThingB -> You are stopping here - uh oh bad news for Person Y.

We don't know what ThingA values vs. ThingB - You are still saying it's net bad news for Person Y without seeing the full picture - it might not be bad for anyone if it all cancels out for the most part.

So yes patent infringement is bad for the party doing it - only if the party claiming the infringement does not also infringe on their patents. In this case Apple infringes S3 patents.

<comment><USER6> You're trying to take last month's news and net it out with todays news. This is absurd.

Let's take is as a given that Person Y stole something from Person X and was found guilty of that last month.

Now there's a question about whether Person X also stole something from Person Y.

If the judge today rules for Person X that is bad news for X. If the judge rules for Person Y that is bad news for Y. It's that simple.

If the Cavs beat the Mavricks in game 1, losing Game 2 is bad news for them because they would have been up 2-0 instead of tied 1-1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> this ruling isn't final, and Apple's victory isn't terribly meaningful in the long term.

Source: [http://thisismynext.com/2011/07/15/preliminary-ruling- finds-...](http://thisismynext.com/2011/07/15/preliminary-ruling-finds-htc- infringes-apple-patents/)

PS: that's a real lawyer reporting, so I guess he know what he talking about. Rather than some random reportor

</comment><comment><USER12> You gotta love how this is one of the most active posts here right now, but it somehow has been relegated to the third page. Fuck Google fanbois and fuck this bullshit that constantly goes on at Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER13> > "We are confident the Commission will ultimately agree with the ITC staff's > finding that HTC does not violate any of Apple's patents. Litigation that > attacks open-source products limits consumer choice, hurts the economy, and > discourages innovation."

Just like you were confident you'd win those Nortel patents with those cute bids?</comment>