Snapchat installs fell 16% in April; Instagram continues to pull further ahead - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/15/report-snapchat-installs-fell-16-in-april-as-instagram-continues-to-pull-further-ahead/ <comment><USER2> Snapchat was always evolving the product way too slow for me. It took them forever to liberate the emojis into stickers. The few hit features they nailed won't help them cross over. It could happen that they will continue to lack some core features, that make a social app used widely & frequently. Like how Facebook seamlessly added threaded comments somewhere along the way, while following conversations on Twitter falls under graph theory.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't help that their application is a buggy mess either - I can't remember the last time I managed to wrangle snapchat into taking a landscape snap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Snapchat vs Instagram is like Myspace vs Facebook. I find Snapchat completely unusable and even can't figure out concept of it.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's not what I see when I look at that plain chart

<comment><USER6> The numbers are there in the second paragraph.

> 21.1 million, compared to 25.2 million

<comment><USER5> Looks insignificant

<comment><USER7> Considering an install valued at $.26 [1], 4.1 million installs (the difference) is worth a bit over a million dollars, in one month.

Either you make enough to make a million bucks a month insignificant, or you just have little sense of scale.

[1] - [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-benchmark-for-cost-per- ins...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-benchmark-for-cost-per-install-via- Facebook-ads)

<comment><USER8> >That puts the actual downloads for the month at 21.1 million, compared to 25.2 million for April 2016, back when the company was riding a user-growth hot streak.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the title is a bit misleading - these numbers are year-over-year, comparing April 2016 to April 2017. So it's not a loss of $1M in one month. It's more that this month last year, they had 4.1M more installs. Judging by the graph, it looks like they only dipped ~1M installs between March and April 2017.

That's not to say that this looks good, but it's not as disastrous as it seems.

<comment><USER6> It's not misleading, YoY is the standard way to do that comparison which is why it didn't need to be in the headline.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


App update rejected for mentioning iPhone XR in release notes - <AUTHOR> http://www.eod.com/blog/2018/09/rejected/ <comment><USER2> It's considerably rare for me to do this, but I'll advocate for the devil in the white suit.

Imagine you added support for a device that's not out yet, that you probably don't even physically possess (unless you're a heavy developer, and even that's probably a pre-release model), but that you're assuming will readily accept your updated app. Except when finally the device is released, it turns out the support you added for the new device was imperfectly applied, frustrating the experience of users everywhere who are used to this app working just fine on other devices but not this one.

Now imagine this happening with multiple apps, perhaps because the developer documentation for the device was an inferior match for reality, perhaps because the documentation was consistently mis-interpreted, perhaps because the emulation in development was slightly inaccurate. Whatever the cause, a vast lot of supposedly compatible apps are very much _not._

Which product's image is harmed most by this outcome?

<comment><USER3> That'd make sense if it was what Apple says.

They allow anyone to say that their app is XS-compatible even if they never owned an iPhone.

Their worry is _not_ actual compatibility.

<comment><USER4> True, Apple's stated reasons are even simpler and more sensible: you can't advertise compatibility to a pre-GM application or device. That's part of the rules, and explicitly stated in the original rejection message.

<comment><USER5> GM stands for Gold Master I believe. Apple's concern therefore isn't that the device isn't out yet, it's that it's not finalized, and they don't want an app update to say that it supports something which isn't finalized yet because it could change tomorrow (even if that's unlikely).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This entire thing is based on the author missing and still never noticing after writing this entire rant up the key term in the initial rejection:

      > Apps with compatibility references to a pre-GM version

Apple didn't say you can't mention the iPhone XR, they said you can't claim compatibility with it yet... the author went through some great lengths to play up the absurdity of Apple wanting to keep the model under wraps and it's pretty clear that was never what they were asking

<comment><USER7> Combined with childish behavior and trying to follow the letter but not the spirit of the rules. A great idea if you're being judged by a computer, a bad idea if you're requesting a person to re-review your app.

Why not just state 'compatibility updates' and nothing else?

<comment><USER8> Because had OP done that, then wouldn't have been able to write up this childish screed I just wasted time reading as well as everyone else and thus make a total arse of themself, and waste app reviewers time because OP can't be an adult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A fun read and on the face of it, Apple's stance does seem obstinate/bizarre... but on the other hand, with my testing hat on: how can you claim to support an unreleased phone? There's not even a cloud testing service yet...

<comment><USER10> Xcode ships with a simulator for these phones.

<comment><USER11> Simulator being the key point here. It is not emulating the actual phone itself.

It merely translates the iOS calls into OSX ones. It is not accurate in all cases and can be wildly off when it comes to performance.

<comment><USER12> In a perfect world all app devs would have 10 iPhones To be able to test across all different hardware. Of course, that would be ridiculous.

<comment><USER13> It's even worse: one of each device for every OS version supported, which Apple themselves make exceptionally difficult as it's nearly impossible to downgrade to older OS versions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The same has happened to a few other developers. Luc Vandal tweeted that his Mac app was rejected for mentioning compatibility with macOS Mojave:

[https://twitter.com/lucvandal/status/1042023268352512001/pho...](https://twitter.com/lucvandal/status/1042023268352512001/photo/1)

And Hendrik Holtmann said his app was rejected for mentioning iOS 12 in the release notes - after iOS 12 had been publicly released:

[https://twitter.com/holtmann/status/1042062878965153792](https://twitter.com/holtmann/status/1042062878965153792)

<comment><USER15> Hmm I've received a couple MAS updates already claiming Mojave compatibility in their release notes. In fact I just updated Magnet, which does so.

<comment><USER14> Yep, Luc's own app was previously approved with Mojave mentioned in the release notes, then rejected later by Apple for mentioning it. It seems to be the luck of the draw, depending on which reviewer you get and how strictly they want to apply the rules that day:

[https://twitter.com/lucvandal/status/1042030087267409925](https://twitter.com/lucvandal/status/1042030087267409925)

<comment><USER16> You can also probably assume that they sometimes miss things. Unfortunately. Rather than just strict application of the rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Fly the pirate flag, toss a hammer at Big Brother, think different — just don't violate Section 3.2 of the Program License Agreement, and communicate to your users words that are on a billboard you drove past on your way to work. Be a rebel, but somewhere else."

Savage!! :D

<comment><USER18> I just read some of his other posts - entertaining writing style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Apple seemed to be very reasonable here—they reached out to the developer sensing their frustration with advice on getting their app approved. Seems to me that apple wants to help this to get approved by investing the effort of calling the developer. Remember all the complaints about how apple doesn't communicate with developers? Seems like they're trying to do better and I never saw any angry app updates. I mean maybe the policy is silly but there's better ways to protest than passive aggressive release notes that would confuse the users. I mean there's a lot of disagreeable things Apple does but is this really the hill you chose to die on?

</comment><comment><USER20> Part of it could be legal. I don't want to say this is likely in any way, but the bottom of every XR page says this:

> iPhone XR has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal > Communications Commission. iPhone XR is not, and may not be, offered for > sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.

It could be that they aren't wanting to imply that they've given out review units or other demo units in violation of not having approval.

I'm not saying it's super likely, but it's also not impossible.

<comment><USER3> This is the only reasonable explanation. If they fail to release it for any reason, they don't want apps to mention a phone that never existed (especially if, say, they don't have the rights to the name)

<comment> village-idiot This is far from the only reasonable explanation. The reasonable explanation is that Apple doesn't want devs claiming compatibility with a device that they can't have possibly tested on yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> An extremely fun read, but the obvious "solution" to this silliness is to simply write "added support for new display sizes such as the iPhone XS." and call it a day.

But I appreciated a look into what happens when you start pushing back...

</comment><comment><USER11> > Clearly, I'm being an obstinate jerk

Yes. That is basically the gist of it.

Messing with low level, customer care team who are just trying to enforce the policies really is pretty childish.

<comment><USER12> I'd suggest that the policies are pretty childish, and anyone who has worked with the App Store before knows full well how completely arbitrary and insane it is--this should come as no surprise.

The Author of the article said it beautifully - _I know that millions of people are battling every day for their dignity and their families and their lives. But, goddammit, this is a bridge too stupid, and I can't cross it._

<comment><USER11> > But, goddammit, this is a bridge too stupid, and I can't cross it.

And I am sure the customer care person at Apple found this so hilarious.

This is nothing more than a refined version of the idiots on YouTube squirting water guns at McDonalds cashiers. Because you know they deserve it for daring to work at McDonalds at the first place.

<comment><USER12> Except McDonalds cashiers don't get six figure salaries to decide the entire fate of your livelihood every time you order a burger.

<comment><USER11> App reviewers don't earn six figure salaries.

From accounts it is a low-level, call centre type role. Actually not far off a McDonalds cashier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> And people wonder why many changelogs are just "Bug fixes and other improvements".

</comment><comment><USER23> I have noticed Apple has gotten meaner in the last 2 months in particular, and this is from someone there since the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER24> The author tried real hard to paint this as some weird Kafkaesque attempt to keep the phone under-wraps, when really all it is is not being able to say your software is compatible with a device that isn't even out yet, and which you've done no testing on. The author comes out of this seeming slightly deranged.

<comment><USER25> I saw the humour in not being able to mention a publicly advertised and software compatible device. I'm honestly not sure how you think app development for new devices on _an existing platform_ works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is standard. For example, you cannot mention support for macOS Mojave, or until last week, iOS 12.

<comment><USER26> So what is expected then? Update your app to support it but not mention the change in the patch notes?

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure, since I have no idea of the rationale behind the rule. Might be because Apple wants apps to seem like they just "always work", rather than requiring them to be fixed for each release? In any case, I've heard people get around this rule with clever wording, as long as they don't explicitly mention the new hardware/software. For example, "dark mode support", "full screen display", etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> ITT: Apple apologists

<comment><USER23> Eh, it is just the way Apple does things, and people are explaining. You can say they are wrong if you want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I love a good story where the little guy stick it to the big guy. The double irony of this is of course that Apple used to be that little guy. In an alternate reality, Steve would have gotten wind of this and done something about it.

<comment><USER29> Which Steve?

<comment><USER30> My theory is that Jobs' main task at Apple was to create theater to distract the press and business folk, so that Woz and the rest of Apple's technical staff could get some decent work done while nobody was looking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The only technicality protecting Apple from massive anti trust regulations with regards to the store is that the iPhone actually isn't a monopoly in cell phone unit shipments.

However, many economists have noted that app revenues (not advertising) is highly skewed towards Apple's platform. When will a $100B app market stop being treated as a feature of physical phone unit shipments, worthy of its own independent regulation?

</comment><comment><USER32> The thing that annoys the most about this is that he seems to hate Apple _SO MUCH_ and yet he continues to be an Apple developer

<comment><USER26> You're allowed to criticize things and continue to use them (in fact, I would argue that you very much _should_ criticize things when they could be improved, regardless of whether you use them or not).

Especially in this case as I imagine a large part of his income is tied to releasing apps for ios devices, so he doesn't _really_ have an option to just stop developing for apple.

<comment><USER32> My point is that the writing style made it seem as if he hates them _SO MUCH_.</comment></comment></comment>


Hacking your AA MagLite with a holiday decoration LED bulb - <AUTHOR> http://milge.com/img/flashlightupgrade.jpg <comment><USER2> Interesting, looks like a fun idea.

How difficult is it to get a new top part (the blue piece in the pictures)? Once you drill it out you wouldn't be able to use the original LED again.

It might be fun also to do something like this with a UV LED, then you could have a black flashlight.</comment>


Web form security – avoiding common mistakes - <AUTHOR> http://codebyjeff.com/blog/2012/12/web-form-security-avoiding-common-mistakes

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here - thanks to everyone spreading this around. It's hardly viral, but getting good notice, which I appreciate.

Quick word on the point of this - I originally wrote it some time ago when I noticed a) a rise in the number of articles and discussions among "newbie" programmers about sophisticated hacking techniques and b) a rise in the number of forum (ie, Stackoverflow) questions that showed a lack of understanding of the very basics

So this article is aimed at people getting into programming and maybe haven't completely grokked just exactly what a web form IS - without which, you really have no hope of writing good code or protecting yourself

I consider this my "public service announcement", and I hope you'll share it with appropriate people so we can make our web a safer place.</comment>


Taiwan ODMs continue moving production out of China despite trade-war truce - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20181204PD210.html <comment><USER2> It's interesting. Taiwanese businesses need to consider their own election cycle as well as the American election cycle. At least they no longer need to worry about the Chinese election cycle!</comment>


Ellen Page may sue Sony over video game nudity - <AUTHOR> http://gaoom.com/2013/10/24/ellen-page-supposedly-suing-sony-and-quantic-dream-for-nude-scene-in-beyond-two-souls/

<comment><USER2> No one else? OK I'll take one for the team. Anyone got a link to the video? :P</comment>


Ask HN: Is the future of software development going to a "no code" basis? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The problem that never seems to be solved by no-code tools is the _debugging_ aspect of coding. Saving a few minutes writing code was never the problem; rather, we need more ways to save hours or days explaining why things behave the way they do.

It's definitely _cool_ when you can wire together a UI without a lot of effort and see it largely work. Yet if _any part_ doesn't work exactly right the first time, you may have no idea why. You are also at the mercy of the tool developer; if it has bugs (or bugs show up next year), you're stuck, and they probably aren't using an open file format that can be hacked to do the right thing.

These no-code tools also, in my experience, interact poorly with revision control, basic teamwork, and other aspects of development. You can't easily do simultaneous edits for example.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I want to launch a discussion on the future of software development. It's a fact that front-end development will be deprecated in a near future with tools like Webflow, Squarespace or Wix. This will mean that the future of front-end development will be made by designers or anyone with good sense of style. My question for debate is: shouldn't we already have a tool that allowed us to build software on a visual / no code matter?

A non technical founder that don't want to waste one year learning to code should have tools available to build software without knowing any programming language? Makes sense or is this just utopian?

<comment><USER3> "Waste" and "one year" are horrible assumptions behind this question.

What about "wasting" 4 years of high school and "wasting" a few years of college? Why should someone with an idea be hampered by wasting this time? One year is nothing, and even if it were a long time, it's not a "waste" \-- you come out of it with a skill that is needed today, ie if you want to be part of the technical side of the company you wish to found.

Secondly, a mere one year of study is not going to result in a skilled practitioner. You will be able to make prototypes.

Digging a little deeper:

> *It's a fact"

No, it isn't. FE development is still not a "mature" space and Wix and the like only offer rather trivial customizations to a well-defined and constrained environment. What you describe as FE development is really content creation and styling, not "development".

Now that I've poo-poo'd the thought, in counterpoint do you know about kintone and the like? There's an entire ecosystem of no-code app development systems out there already. Some of them probably qualify as "mature".

<comment><USER4> Any sufficiently flexible tool for development is pretty much indistinguishable from a programming language. No-code programming is still programming.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting point. I have to agree 100%. No matter how you create an application it will always have to have code. Even if for the user it may seem a "no-code" app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Software without code is like food without ingredients.

Either somebody will describe to the computer what to do in sufficient detail that it can do it, or they won't. If they do, their description is code. If they don't, the computer won't know what to do and you don't have software.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is: can / should it be done on a "visual basis"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can you explain why the certainty of 'It's a fact that front-end development will be deprecated in a near future' ? I'm fairly certain it's 'a possibility', rather 'a fact'

<comment><AUTHOR> I stated it is a fact because of the revenue numbers of Wix and Squarespace (both around $500 Million / year). These numbers establish that they are solving an actual problem. If you look for the next ten years and our kids start to crate Apps and Websites with these tools, we can state with some confidence it will happen. Don't you agree?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could you explain your premise?

I don't know of any "no code" development happening currently. Am I missing something(probably)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Please see my first reply.</comment></comment>


EyeOS: your own cloud desktop - <AUTHOR> http://www.eyeos.org/

<comment><USER2> This is a nice convergence of technology, and very cool and all, but am I the only one who is really bugged by them calling this "your own cloud system"?

"The Cloud" != "a webserver". This is a Javascript desktop with a PHP backend. It _could_ run on a virtual server in a cloud, but that's not even the way they sell it. It's not even sold as an app service ala Google Apps.

Also, check out CorneliOS: <http://www.cornelios.org/>. Similar deal, but built in Perl.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've seen this kind of "desktop in a browser" thing before and it seems a bit daft to me (and it certainly isn't an operating system).

There's so much scope for better metaphors than the "desktop" one. Google's apps are a good example of this.

Your browser already gives you far more efficient window management - why try to replicate in an incredibly inefficient fashion with javascript?

<comment><USER4> Then your desktop becomes more portable, collaborative, hackable, and open. Windows or OSX could make their local scripting environments more open and universal but they have 0 incentive. So eventually the browser will do it. Inefficiencies will be squeezed out over time. Tabs aren't really windows although they will be (or vice versa).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This would be a compelling idea for surfing the web securely from work, IF IT PROXIED TRAFFIC.

It doesn't, and I'm afraid folks will be mislead by the way it seems it does. All internet browsing still uses your local connection and a tcpdump proves it. Beware...you're not protected.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow! I just installed it on my ultra cheap shared hosting space. Edit: If you're wondering, the only requirements for the server are Apache (1.3.x or 2.x) & PHP 5.

It also has a (still limited) iPhone front end.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We've just installed this in the office and are trialling it as our workspace.

It seems pretty handy initially.

<comment><USER7> Thank you, this seems to be quite a neat thing.

Wonder how they've been able to stay off the radar with 400 K users, I'd never even heard of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same. They were in a SourceForge email yesterday evening - that's how I found out about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The key with these is to be able to get to a good browser experience ASAP. <http://eyeos.info> ..... you have to open the "Applications" folder and then look for "eyeNav" ... (drag that to the desktop) Personally I'd want to see a Firefox icon but I guess someone needs to build a XUL parser in there.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't mind using this initially for checking email and web browsing .... if I could edit code remotely & productively via sshfs or similar in something like Bespin. It's not something that's "better" than a traditional desktop ... but if the license is permissive the desktop becomes so much more flexible, hackable, and personal.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's what's interesting me - looks quite easy to create tools/apps for. We have a few remote workers which this might work well for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Using a browser inside the desktop that runs inside my browser: priceless!</comment>


Ask YC: Has anyone else here worked in the video game industry? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious... <comment><USER2> I graduate from college way into CG. Oddly I'm not into video games. After some exploration though I found that people in that industry are over worked and underpaid. I found other uses for CG instead. Not really an answer to your question but there ya go...

<comment><USER3> I've been in the game industry as a programmer since 2000. I read this site everyday, but I'm not submitting an application to ycombinator, so maybe I'm not the audience for your question.

I wanted to reply to the overworked/underpaid thing, because you read it a lot on non-gaming hacking sites...it's like parents tell their baby hackers to behave, or they'll have to go work in the game industry.

If you're talented and not willing to accept shitty working conditions, you won't end up in a sweatshop. Lots of good companies treat their employees very well, both in terms of work conditions and compensation. Game houses on the West Coast are abundant, but there are some very good ones in the East (Epic being one of the brighter lights there), and middle (Raven and Human Head in Wisconsin, id in Texas, many many others), so don't feel like you have to readjust to a Californian way of life or living expenses.

The rough equivalent of sweatshops _do_ exist, but these aren't as rampant as you would think, even at places that have been (in)famous for them, like Electronic Arts.

Aim for smaller, privately-held game companies. They tend to be most satisfying to work for. If they get bought by EA or Microsoft (or Activision, or 2K, or, or, or...), jump ship when your options vest. Very few people seem to be as happy after the acquisition, but there are always exceptions.

If you are a generic coder with no identity within your company or project, jump ship immediately. Before the interview, if you can. :) Most places won't have you in the spotlight at all, but are very good about making everyone feel like an important contributor to a team. If you don't feel like that, you should get out, because the work is always challenging, but it doesn't suck unless you feel like a cog in a machine.

<comment><USER4> Just to add another data point -- I was interested in the games industry, and interviewed around a bit. I turned away because it looked like overworked/underpaid was the norm. Some people (like icculus) said that wasn't necessarily the case, but even they acknowledged it was the norm, and it's hard to be sure of what you're getting into when you're interviewing.

This agrees with the obvious economics at work: games are sexy, so programmers are in greater supply, so their value goes down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes. I was in R&D of a game company, worked on console game titles (PS, PS2) and CG film productions. Also did some technology demos at siggraph.

Overworking---well, you can't avoid occasional crunch time, and because of the nature of game development, you sometimes have to face the design being overturned and have to rework development. But how far it goes largely depends on the team and/or the culture of the company. I know some who were deep in crunch time for over 9 months to meet the deadlines of monthly milestones; but also I know some who were able to leave office 6-7pm most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, I work on HeroEngine (<http://www.heroengine.net>), a MMO platform. The guys behind it are really smart, and I'm lucky to be able to learn from them.

If you're interested in game development, the single best thing you could do is hang out in the IRC channel #gamedev on the server irc.afternet.org and learn from them. There are a surprising number of excellent developers in that channel, so even if you're not interested in game development you'd probably find it worthwhile anyway. Just wait for an interesting conversation.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. My slant is more to game design, though, and I've never been able to find a web community specifically for it. Something like The Forge (<http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/>), but with video games in mind instead of the Pen and Paper sort. Heard of anything?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes, I spent about 3.5yrs in it. I can't really agree with the underpaid/overworked thing; the pay was fair, and the hours not unreasonable.

I left the industry because the idea of spending 2+ years on something that may-or-may-not pan out, with no way to tell before release, was beginning to get me down.

I realize startups are sort of the same thing, but I think they actually offer earlier feedback and greater opportunities for recovery than games.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, I have worked for several game companies, started an own and currently I'm working as freelancer on a video game.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just mobile games for a while. And of course my erotic puzzle game ;-)</comment>


NSA's Best Are 'Leaving in Big Numbers,' Insiders Say - <AUTHOR> https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/12/10/2148243/nsas-best-are-leaving-in-big-numbers-insiders-say <comment><USER2> I don't believe it for a second. Even if there's some truth in this, I am pretty convinced this is just a PR stunt hoping to gain them some public sympathy.

"Heroes", riiiight. As a guy born in 1980 and knowing a lot of "hackers" back in the day (and religiously avoiding to learn how to break into people's computers; and I am very proud of that), IMO most of these men and women are former highly un-ethical kids "cracking for fun and profit" and then they were caught and given a choice (sort of like Kevin Mitnick, I'd imagine). Since they didn't want to be erased from this Earth they made the pretty sensible choice to join the NSA. I mean, imagine them knowing everything about your family and making you an offer you can't refuse in a room 5 stories below the ground level... and you're a scrawny 18-year old who just found the world is big and that you can actually piss off very powerful people while you're "poking for fun". I'm sure you'd join NSA as well, especially with the promise of being part of the elite undeground hacker force and being pretty well paid in the process too.

I am sure there is newer blood in there but I'd classify them as the drone pilots -- they never really get to see and experience for themselves the consequences of their actions and are probably as naive as pups. Did you ever notice how the drone pilots are carefully fed neutral and faceless terminology like "engage the target" while "kill these 20 human beings on the vague suspicions they're terrorists" are the words their supervisor is swallowing?

If I'm right this is a PR stunt, I hope it fails. If I'm wrong and they're bleeding people, then I hope NSA bleeds to death.</comment>


Ask HN: What skills do you need to acquire to benefit the society? - <AUTHOR> Ex: System Thinking Finance <comment><USER2> This question is way too open ended.

I would say that most jobs benefit society.

Benefit yourself first, then your family and friends, then society.</comment>


Eyecatch, CI for UI/UX, now in public beta - <AUTHOR> https://eyecatch.io <comment><USER2> I don't sign up with services that ask to access private repositories!</comment>


Victoria Police filmed handcuffing woman over anti-lockdown Facebook post - just-juan-post https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/victoria-police-filmed-handcuffing-pregnant-woman-over-anti-lockdown-facebook-post-c-1286738.html <comment> just-juan-post > "As a result, a 28-year old female has been charged with the offence of > incitement and has been bailed to appear at the Ballarat Magistrates Court > on 25 January 2021.

> "Those still thinking of attending the protest in Ballarat on Saturday can > expect a swift and firm response from police."

I would suggest to the good people of Australia (and New Zealand) that they hang sheets out their windows or create posters and yard signs to let the government know their stance on the topic.

How much longer should this go on?</comment>


What's the Matter with Covert Action? - <AUTHOR> http://www.filfre.net/2017/03/whats-the-matter-with-covert-action/ <comment><USER2> The article is long and entertainingly written. It has lots of references to 80s computer games that people might enjoy (like Pirates!). But the key insight, I believe, is:

 _If Covert Action had believable, mimetic, tantalizing — or at least interesting — plots to foil, I submit that it could have been a tremendously compelling game, without changing anything else about it. Instead, though, it's got this painfully artificial box of whirling gears._

I suppose in the 80s, given the limitations of the box, there was a much larger emphasis on "narratology" in games, but this criticism might hold for most failed games.

Edit: Never seen this site before. Who is this guy? Now I am going down a rabbit hole...

<comment><USER3> I always find it interesting that procedurally generated games like Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac only embrace procedural generation to a certain extent. They stitch the levels together in a procedural way and in some cases the items and things are random. But, crucially, the hundreds of rooms (or tiles) aren't random, but instead lovingly handcrafted. It's funny when I see a unique room repeat after a hundred hours (like the Isaac room that has a bunch of keys in a key shape). Maybe that's one way to solve these mimetic issues and is similar to the suggestion by Kate Compton given in the article.

<comment><USER4> A similar thing is true of the latest well-reviewed open world game, Horizon Zero Dawn. The game's devs said that a majority of the world is "procedurally generated", but that their process still allowed artists go to in and fine tune spaces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having just watched CirclMastr's Let's Play of Covert Action on YouTube, and playing it myself (and I think I came across this article too), I have to say that Covert Action really feels like what it ended up as: an unpolished rush- job that someone put a lot of thought into that maybe didn't come out onscreen. There's a lot of good there and further development of the ideas would have turned it into a real classic. There's a reason it's one of the long-lasting underdogs; it's not just Sid Meier's name.

I'm glad it exists, and for anyone who wants to teach kids about very basic crypto (i.e. letter replacement, removing spaces, etc.), I suggest the "training" for the Crypto skill; it's also good to go and brush up on your own skills. Similarly, the wiretapping is a genuinely interesting logic puzzle which can be used to teach the concept of physically representing 1/0 and logic gates (and how the result may not always be what you expect).

As far as "The Covert Action Rule", I guess the question is how you approach the game. If you look at it in terms of "older" games (i.e. Zork et al), having a notepad beside the computer to take notes seemed the most logical thing in the world to me. In many cases while playing games with complex storylines and puzzle-solving, it still does. I never found the tactical sections making me "lose track" of why I was in a building - either I was there to grab an Agent or I was there to get information to go and do so that I hadn't gotten by wiretapping or crypto.

</comment><comment><USER6> > _I can easily generate 10,000 bowls of plain oatmeal, with each oat being in > a different position and different orientation, and mathematically speaking > they will all be completely unique. But the user will likely just see a lot > of oatmeal. Perceptual uniqueness is the real metric, and it's darn tough. > It is the difference between an actor being a face in a crowd scene and a > character that is memorable._

This was a big problem for a recent, massively hyped game that flopped (Steam refunds, etc), _No Man 's Sky_

</comment><comment><USER7> Great references on procedural story generation. I used to cringe a little bit every time my students would tout the procedural generation in their project that would result in limitless replayability.

Someone has to enjoy the first play, before they'll replay. You don't know how to make _one_ good game yet, never mind a factory that makes good games.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting to compare Civilization, Alpha Centauri and Beyond Earth. I felt Alpha Centauri was far more compelling because of its additional narrative elements. Beyond Earth attempted to borrow these same narrative elements from Alpha Centauri but failed to make it compelling. In Alpha Centauri the narrative was often anchored to the ideology and personality of your leader, whereas Beyond Earth took a far less rigid approach to leaders and factions.

<comment><USER9> My reaction to Alpha Centauri was exactly the opposite: After having played Civilization, I found the narrative in AC to be an annoying disruption of the game I wanted to play.

<comment><USER8> Did you just want to play Civ2.5 or did you find the theme compelling?

I enjoyed both games, but Alpha Centauri always felt more real because of the narrative. It was probably the most immersive game I've ever played and it isn't just me I've had friends that had dreams in the Alpha Centauri universe years after playing it. I can't say that about any other game (and I know people that played civ2 weekly for a nearly a decade).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The classic X-COM games rely heavily on procedural content. There's only a small set of simple alien missions, but I think there are three factors that let it succeed:

1\. Harsh consequences. You can't ignore the aliens. Any random alien mission might be the one that makes some country withdraw funding. It might be setting up a tactical battle that's too difficult for you to fight. The alien detection and interception mini-game always has strategic consequences.

2\. Hidden information. You start with very limited view of what the aliens are doing. Even when you've researched the best radar you can't cover the enter globe. This makes it easy to imagine they're doing something more complicated than they really are. It's like the argument that text adventure games are more immersive than graphical ones because the images are only limited by your imagination.

3\. Gradually unlocked story. The games have a research tree, and as you retrieve alien bodies and technology from random battles you unlock more things to research. Many of these research items serve only to explain the story. They do nothing to help you win but the first time you play they're some of the most interesting things to research. It gives you a real feeling of progress beyond just getting better weapons.

Many games feature the first two factors, eg. roguelikes, but I think the addition of the gradually unlocked story is what makes the game truly great. It combines the mimesis and diegesis that Jimmy Maher talks about in a way that makes both of them better.

Also, the games are available on GOG, but I strongly recommend using the Free Software engine reimplementation OpenXCOM if you're going to play them, because it fixes a lot of bugs and interface inconveniences.

</comment><comment><USER11> " _Because processing is, to use Crawford's words again, "the very essence of what a computer does," the capability that in turn enables the interactivity that makes computer games unique as a medium, games that heavily emphasize processing are_ purer _than those that rely more heavily on fixed data._ "

I'd buy that. Purer, but not better. Procedural generation, in theory, has a lot of advantages, but in practice, in many areas, it hasn't matched the old school approach.

<comment><USER12> I found the same thing when creating art using fractals. Purer, not better. Just when I found a configuration that seemed perfect, all of the details were inspected and found lacking. As a spectator, you had to enjoy it as a product of math first, and then you could enjoy it as art. After a while I just picked up a pen and paper and made sketches of what I saw in my mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Having been an avid player at the time I can see how a specific well written narrative as opposed to procedural generated stories would have benefited the overall player experience, but in all honesty I don't think it would have made that much of a difference in the games success. You either enjoyed playing or you didn't; the story was always somewhat secondary to just solving the missions and ideally getting the mastermind. Cryptanalysis and circuit logic weren't everyone's cup of tea especially when you consider games like King's Quest 5 & Ultima 6 came out the same year and the years that followed were a blitz of games with much improved graphics and gameplay like Wolf 3d, Wing Commander 2, Dune, etc...

</comment><comment><USER14> The author seems to think that ludology vs narratology is the same as procedural vs static content, which I don't think is true at all. You can easily make an open-world game with static content, you just need a lot more static content.

<comment><USER15> I took from it more that it's much more difficult to create a compelling narrative with procedural generation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I guess this guy is much more historically focused, but it seems odd to present the thesis he does and not even mention _No Man 's Sky_ as an obvious example of the kind of failure he's talking about.

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh, in games. I thought this was going to be about the role of the CIA.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sid's theory about games seems to suggest that Invisible, Inc. should be boring. I have to say I've found it anything but.

Has anyone played both Covert Action and Invisible, Inc for comparison?

<comment><USER19> Yes.

I don't think the "Covert Action Rule" (which I assume is what you're referring to with "Sid's theory) really applies to Invisible, Inc. The strategic layer in that game is really just basically "pick your next map" with a bunch of other options that are all related to your next break-in.

Covert Action isn't like that. Every minigame/layer switch that you make is fairly jarring. It can be hard to remember things between layers unless you've got a notepad handy, and it breaks immersion enough to be frustrating unless you really, really like the game (which I do).

For instance, during a break-in, you can hack computers to get information you want if the people whose building you are breaking into have it. But you have to type a name query in a text box. It leads to moments where you ask yourself "What was that guy's name? Was I looking for the Stasi hideout in Budapest or Bucharest?" And there's no easy way to get the answers unless you have good memory or you write stuff down.

Same problem with the crypto minigame, but worse because it's explicitly timed, though also easier because you can decrypt without knowing what you're reading in lower difficulty.

Any time you enter the driving minigame is also jarring because it basically has no connection to the stategic layer at all. You kind of succeed at it, or you don't.

So I don't really think the two games are actually that directly comperable (but I like both of them, fwiw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "One decision that hasn't aged terribly well is the way the game lets Max score with progressively hotter secretaries as he cracks more cases."

Watched a James Bond movie lately?

</comment><comment><USER21> > Suffice to say that generating believable fictions ... is a tough nut to > crack.

Dwarf Fortress has smashed this nut to smithereens. Too bad it requires significant computing resources and a huge amount of programming work to implement.

<comment><USER22> So you're saying that generating believable fictions is a tough nut to crack?

<comment><USER21> Yes, I believe that generating believable fiction programatically is still difficult today. Lots has changed since Covert Action was developed (game size is no longer constrained by 3.5" floppies and computer performance is hugely improved), but generating believable story lines without lots of templates is still difficult.</comment></comment></comment>


Hedgehog Ethereum wallet: Build DApps like apps, without centralized keys - <AUTHOR> https://hedgehog.audius.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all - I'm Roneil, one of the cofounders of Audius. We built Hedgehog to solve a specific pain point we faced - how can we get non crypto-native / non- technical users to sign up for a decentralized app? Current onboarding flows using Metamask and other alternatives were too cumbersome, time-consuming, and restrictive for our needs. We needed a way to generate a wallet on behalf of a user without them even knowing crypto was operating behind the scenes.

Hedgehog lives in your front end Javascript code. A user enters a username (or email) and password, which is used to secure a set of encrypted auth artifacts that are generated client-side and stored in the browser's localStorage / on your (the application developer's) server. In this way, the encrypted auth artifacts can be retrieved and consumed on secondary devices without centralizing custody and control of the private key.

If the centralized server hosting the keys goes down, users can continue to access their wallet on the devices they already have. If the centralized server is compromised or operated by bad actors, the resources required to decrypt a stored auth artifact would be immense. However - this is why we recommend using Hedgehog only in low-to-no financial value use cases.

This approach is not without tradeoffs - but for the right use-cases we believe this will provide a needed alternative.

Happy to answer any questions you all have!

<comment><USER2> Hey Roneil, I'm really new to crypto development and I'm having a hard time finding crypto communities for developers (the one who builds stuff). I've checked out eth's forum but it's not really developer focused, it's too general.

Where do you usually hang out? I would like to learn more about building crypto stuff and would like to participate in a community. Can you point me in the right direction?

Thank you!

PS: I have completely no idea what Audius is about, but it sounds cool. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there! Unfortunately I haven't found any high-quality online communities of crypto builders - most of my connections to other folks building are offline / irl. Would encourage you to attend local developer groups to get to know others in the space!

There are _tons_ of helpful resources online though, as lots of folks write tutorials and other things. Googling most problems you face will yield good results.

<comment><USER2> Oh wow that's really unfortunate. I met some crypto people locally but almost all of them are trading focused. I also attended some "blockchain events" but most of them are just people shilling their coins/how to become a better trader.

Maybe I haven't tried hard enough finding the builders.

Thank you Roneil, and good luck on your endeavors!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to hear that - I've had good experiences in the past at Hackathons and other developer-focused events rather than general "crypto" or "blockchain" events.

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is so badly needed in the Ethereum space. Metamask is a massive drag and a known onboarding blocker -- Hedgehog seems like a huge leap forward. Congrats team!

<comment><USER4> This could occupy a useful space, but it is by no means a Metamask replacement (which they explain why).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The hedgehog library is completely unsafe considering that any third party library or browser extension loaded in the website using the SDK can loop through localStorage to read the entropy value therefore recreating the hd wallet and stealing the user's account.

<comment><USER6> This.

This is why FinneyFor uses an iFrame to keep the private key safe in localStorage only accessible from JS running on the same domain. FinneyFor uses postMessage to communicate between the parent frame when payment is processed, so you get the benefits of creating transactions in any kind of browser, but none of the risks as the parent rightfully points out.

[https://finneyfor.com/](https://finneyfor.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> We documented this here: [https://audiusproject.github.io/hedgehog- docs/#security-cons...](https://audiusproject.github.io/hedgehog- docs/#security-considerations)

This is why we recommend that you audit all 3rd-party Javascript in your app for accesses to localstorage, and avoid sourcing 3rd-party javascript from uncontrolled origins (the code could be switched out from under you if it is not baked into your application)

The post message model is an interesting one - we looked into designing Hedgehog in that way, but decided it ultimately did not help solve this issue and created unnecessary complexity. If you include Javascript from libraries or other origins on your page, eg. Google Analytics, that Javascript could still post-message into your iframe.

Perhaps we are wrong here though! Is FinneyFor open-source? Would love to see how this is implemented.

<comment><USER6> We don't have any other js libraries on FinneyFor so there would never be that problem.

Auditing the source code of all libraries is a tall order. And, even if you don't find a bug, there still might be some that someone else could exploit with bugs in your code and the js libraries.

Finney For is not open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks compelling, been waiting for something like this to come along. Built a couple dapps with Metamask and the popups and mnemonic phrases and browser extension installation were a serious UX issue that had no real workaround and seemingly no timeline for improvement. AFAIK, development seems to have slowed or stopped entirely on Metamask? Will try working with this and share any feedback. Nice work guys, thanks for moving the space forward

<comment><USER8> MetaMask is actually working hard on these problems, and building faster than ever, but they're big problems that aren't trivially fixed in a point release. You can expect some big announcements this summer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Certainly a much needed application in the Ethereum space.

As a blockchain game developer, I have talked ad nauseum ([https://email@example.com/cache-the- gam...](https://email@example.com/cache-the-game- switching-from-ethereum-to-steem)) about reasons why we switched away from Ethereum for most transactions (but not all).

The UX of the wallet being one difficulty for adoption. There are other even bigger reasons (in my opinion) - variable mining fees per transaction being a large one.

<comment><USER10> lol I made an account just to add this reply. Are you familiar with EIP 1559? There are solid efforts currently ramping up research to change the fee market from an auction to a flat fee:

[https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-1559-fee-market- change-...](https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-1559-fee-market-change-for- eth-1-0-chain/2783)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any Ethereum developers have a plan once ETH gets log jammed again?

Apps will be slow to respond and take minutes or hours between updates.

Is this accepted as you wait for a new solution to the byzantine generals problem?

<comment><USER12> Sidechains like Loom network are making progress, but Ethereum 2.0 is a ways off.

<comment><USER13> Could you explain you statement with facts ?

<comment><USER12> Loom has better scalability. Most transactions can happen on a sidechain.

[https://medium.com/loom-network/everything-you-need-to- know-...](https://medium.com/loom-network/everything-you-need-to-know-about- loom-network-all-in-one-place-updated-regularly-64742bd839fe)

Ethereum 2.0 will have sharding. That should speed up transactions but sidechains will probably always be cheaper and sometimes no fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This looks brilliant, addresses a very real pain point and your landing page communicates it well with the demo. Kudos!

Will give this a try on our Dapp.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is awesome! Looks so much more streamlined and easier to use. Excited to see it used widely.

</comment><comment><USER16> I guess you can't change your password (while keeping the same private key), can you?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can! This would re-encrypt your locally decrypted wallet seed using the new credential and store it under the newly generated lookup key

<comment><USER17> If old pw is considered leaked, new seed must be generated as well. Leaked password is the main reason why users would change passwords.

<comment><AUTHOR> True - was answering the general case of password change, eg. some folks like to rotate passwords every so often in the absence of a known leak or breach.

In the case of a compromised password the entire wallet should be abandoned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Excited to see what people build with this

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome launch!</comment>


Uber employees lose faith and explore exit - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/c6bc4b2c-0012-11e7-8d8e-a5e3738f9ae4 <comment><USER2> This article seems to have a single recruiter, who used to work for Uber, as their source. It says an uptick of 10% but doesn't give any idea on what kind of volume that is or was before the 10% uptick. Did he get 10 people? did he get 5? did he get 50?

This is similar 'reporting' that the actual recruiters themselves give me when they call-- that they have great jobs with great pay if I'll give them all my information and some of the information on peers of mine. When there are no jobs, just talk.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, this is not the quality of journalism a paid periodical like FT should be publishing. If there is evidence, print it, but this sounds like someone was fed an article title from a trending meme machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a wide gulf between the experience backgrounds of senior leadership at the largest tech startups [1] and those of largest companies worldwide [2]. I think this is obvious, but worth noting the differences.

While there may be similar undergraduate or even graduate pedigree, there is a massive difference in experience at the CEO level.

For the top 5 startups worldwide: AirBnB, Uber, Hootsuite, Medium, and 500px, NONE of the CEOs had much experience in leading large or critical organizations before they came into the job.

For the top 5 companies worldwide: Walmart, State-Grid, China Petro, Sinopec and Shell, ALL of the CEOs had decades of leadership experience managing larger and more diverse workforces in more critical capacities.

It could be argued that you can't start a successful startup with traditional leadership background, perhaps that is true. However over a certain size, it's a whole different ballgame in terms of how you run and manage a company. "What got you here, won't get you there."

MSFT, GOOG, APPL all seem to be outliers in many respects, including the fact that at a certain size they brought in someone with a more traditional background to "run" the company (Ballmer from P&G, Schmidt from Sun/Novell, Sculley from Pepsi).

[1] [http://www.startupranking.com/top](http://www.startupranking.com/top)

[2] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/07/20/revealed- the-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/07/20/revealed-the-biggest- companies-in-the-world-in-2016/)

<comment><USER5> "... S&P 500 companies where the founder is still CEO are more innovative, generate 31% more patents, create patents that are more valuable, and are more likely to make bold investments to renew and adapt the business model ..." [1]

[1] [https://hbr.org/2016/03/founder-led-companies-outperform- the...](https://hbr.org/2016/03/founder-led-companies-outperform-the-rest- heres-why)

<comment><USER4> Note, that I don't point to them being founders as the key differentiation, it's that they are founders with no large scale management experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone else feel like there might be a media attack on Uber lately, possibly funded by competitors or opposing municipalities/taxi companies?

It seems like a lot of different kind of bad news have surfaced lately about the company (sexism, expense > income, CEO asshattery, screwing over drivers). All of these seem legit, but seeing them all blow up over the space of a few months makes me think there might be a concerted effort to hurt the company.

Not saying the company does not deserve it though.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Recruiters in the Bay Area and executives at rival companies say they have seen an uptick in job applications from Uber employees, as its workers lose faith in the company's leadership and start to doubt the value of their stock options."

Self fulfilling prophecy?

<comment><USER8> Non-linear complex system . . . ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _For employees at Uber, quitting the company often means walking away from restricted stock units or stock options worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in Silicon Valley's most highly valued private company. With Uber currently worth about $70bn [...]_

FT makes it sound like this is hard cash that employees are walking away from. The options are paper money, and $70bn is not was Uber is "worth", but merely a valuation projected from the most recent investment round.

<comment><USER10> Especially when it goes down under - the paper money value essentially becomes zero. The only semi-positive outcome would be acquisition, but with Lyft doing "okay" I'm not even sure there are other options...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> \--Full Text--

 __Uber employees lose faith and explore exit ___Competitors and recruiters find more job applications from car-hailing app workers_

9 HOURS AGO by: Leslie Hook in San Francisco

Recruiters in the Bay Area and executives at rival companies say they have seen an uptick in job applications from Uber employees, as its workers lose faith in the company's leadership and start to doubt the value of their stock options.

Uber has gone from crisis to crisis over the past five weeks, prompting increasing numbers of employees to explore the idea of leaving a start-up that was once considered one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious and lucrative workplaces.

"I have seen quite a few people who have been looking to leave Uber," said one recruiter, who previously worked at the car-hailing company. "One of the main reasons is lack of faith in senior leadership."

He said the number of unsolicited résumés from Uber employees coming across his desk spiked last week, a time when two former employees published personal accounts alleging harassment and sexism at the company. He received more résumés from Uber in one week than he had the previous month.

For employees at Uber, quitting the company often means walking away from restricted stock units or stock options worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in Silicon Valley's most highly valued private company. With Uber currently worth about $70bn, a typical middle manager position comes with RSUs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that vest over a four-year period.

"Historically, it has been incredibly difficult to recruit from Uber, which partly has to do with people being unwilling to leave their stock options on the table," says Guillaume Champagne, president at SCGC Executive Search. "From a purely financial perspective, Uber would need to become an awful place for them to leave."

Nevertheless, in the past few weeks, Mr Champagne has seen an increase of about 5-10 per cent in the number of people interested in leaving, particularly those who are "a bit less of a culture fit", he says. "To be fair, people typically know what they are getting into when they join Uber. They know it is a very male-dominated, high-octane, investment banking type of culture," he adds.

In the past two weeks a series of public embarrassments, including a video in which chief executive Travis Kalanick berates an Uber driver, have left the company struggling to recover its image. Mr Kalanick issued an unusual apology after the video was published, saying: "I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up."

Two senior executives quit the company last week, adding to employees' sense of uncertainty. Ed Baker, who was vice-president of product and oversaw Uber's rapid expansion over the past three years, resigned on Friday, attributing his departure to an interest in going into public service. Uber did not comment. Amit Singhal, vice-president of engineering, left the company on Monday.

A spokesman for Uber said the company had not seen attrition rates above normal.

Adding to Uber's woes, the company was sued last week by Alphabet's self- driving car unit, Waymo, which alleges that its rival stole trade secrets and infringed on patents relating to autonomous vehicles. Uber called the allegations "a baseless attempt to slow down a competitor" and said it would defend itself in court.

However, the lawsuit, and the extreme shortage of technical talent in the autonomous vehicle sector, has made the self-driving research unit particularly susceptible to poaching.

"There are definitely more people thinking about leaving," says Alex Rodrigues, who co-founded Embark, a rival driverless trucking start-up, last year. Several employees in Uber's advanced technology group, which is based in Pittsburgh, have left to join rivals in the past month.

More than anything, Uber's recent stumbles have taken the shine off a company that many in Silicon Valley once saw as being invincible, and employees who had planned to stay with Uber through its eventual initial public offering are reconsidering.

While a public offering typically offers an attractive financial prize to employees with equity, Mr Kalanick has said publicly that he wants to delay an IPO as long as possible, meaning that employees' shares will remain illiquid.

"People were lured in with the promise of equity . . . but now they are realising that they won't see a return on that for a long time," says the recruiter who previously worked at Uber. "There is a lot of resistance in upper management to doing an IPO."

Others say that doubt is starting to sink in. "Previously it was difficult to get them [Uber employees] because of their stock. Now they don't seem so confident about what that's worth," says an executive at one of the largest tech companies in the Valley.

</comment><comment><USER12> Paywall

<comment><USER13> Two options - (1) Click on "Web" on the submission, then follow the link via Google or (2) Search for the title on Google and then follow the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unlike the WSJ, the "web" trick still works for FT. (although this article doesn't have much new news)

<comment><USER13> Since it does not work, does Google demote their links?

<comment><USER15> It does work but only if you haven't tried to read it already (that is, they set a cookie or something when you first try to open the article that sticks when you open it from Google).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pay wall?</comment>


How to start and scale a full stack startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.42floors.com/how-to-start-and-scale-a-full-stack-startup/ <comment><USER2> Many engineering types seem to feel more at home making tools to "automate all the things". On the surface, it appears a lot easier than making 100s or 1000s of phone calls, but it can be dangerous because it gives you the feeling of doing important work (not to say it isn't important, but for early stage startups, it's not the highest priority).

But I guess everyone is learning that this is not a substitute for all the grunt work needed to grow a business. PG wrote it in his "Do Things that Don't Scale" essay:

[http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

\--

On another note, I hope this term doesn't catch on, because full stack already has an abundance of meanings depending on who you are talking to:

\- Full Stack Web Developer (backend, frontend, maybe design?)

\- Full Stack Developer (backend, frontend, design, ???)

\- Full Stack Developer (older meaning) (knowledgable about hardware and software)

\- Full Stack Startup (developing, business, and everything else?. They call it a "complete, end-to-end product or service")

<comment><USER3> I'm just waiting for the Full Stack Cloud to become a thing

<comment><USER4> Surely that would disrupt the industry. Social, mobile, local!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the sad thing here is the idea that code is so expensive and rigid that it's better to slog through something manually, just to avoid the potential of being locked in by code.

I get that sometimes automation sets you on a course of infinite refinement, and you end up investing more money that you should have making some tool cover 100% of all possible use cases. But that doesn't mean you never should have _started_ building the tool, just that you went way too damn far once the "bugs" and "feature requests" came rolling in.

What about the relative costs and risks associated with hiring a workforce for all the manual labor? There's a certain net weight in work that needs to be done, you can shovel it by hand or you can build a machine to help you. How is it not a winning move to hire fewer, smarter people, and empower them with a great software stack?

The goal isn't to build a machine which can do 100% of the work. But whatever the product you sell, you may find you can spend $1 in engineering to reduce the variable cost of delivering that product by more than $1. That's printing money. But to identify these opportunities, and more importantly to _prioritize_ these opportunities and stop working on the BS never-pay-you-back feature, I think you need a project manager who can understand software complexity as well as the business case.

<comment><USER6> "code is so expensive and rigid"

For a former embedded systems engineer, this is a hilarious sentiment ... if code you can deploy to your web server two minutes after you've written it is "rigid", I'd hate to see what the current generation of software engineers would think about not being able to "reROM" an embedded device once it was shipped. Even remote-FLASH capabilities are a pretty recent invention.

I think the main problem the article describes is that if you prematurely write software for a perceived problem, you will often be wrong. Writing software will always be more expensive than some number of manual operations, but those manual operations, in the absence of a clear specification and solution, will help you understand the problem domain in ways you wouldn't have otherwise.

<comment><USER5> I said 'the sad thing is _the idea_ that code is so expensive and rigid'. I personally don't think that code is particularly expensive or rigid at all, perhaps least of all this type of specialized task automation code.

I guess there are two ways that you "will often be wrong" when automating a specific task. 1) You could improperly or so incoherently automate the task that it actually is harder to for your users to accomplish the task with the tool -- failure to improve productivity of the stated task, or 2) you could successfully automate the task at hand, but either the improvement is too minimal, the task is too rare, or the code cannot be well leveraged when the task needs to change, meaning you never get to break-even on the investment. Both failure modes can be well defended against by a good PM.

Are you saying, that by shipping some automation code, now just by nature of having the tool in the workforce's hands, they are actually less able to understand the problem domain and come up with better ways of doing things in the future?

I think of it a bit differently; the automation of a given approach gets _so good_ that a competing idea that could actually produce a better outcome, but must be done completely manually, is so inefficient compared to the automated workflow as to result in a negative effect, and so it's dismissed. (E.g. you earned an extra $10k on this client doing it your way, but if you used the automated fast-path, you could have just closed 5 more clients at $10k each in the same time).

One way I see this often manifest is the idea that sales always wants to be able to say YES to the prospect / client. If you have a large software automation toolset, you only say YES when the needs match the capabilities, because you lose money every time you work on the special-case clients. I think basically you sacrifice growth rate in this case in order to be a jack- of-all-trades.

<comment><USER6> I totally missed "the idea" \- it seems like we're in violent agreement!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't really consider this example to qualify as a "full stack startup".

If 42floors was a real full stack startup, they would be developing, buying, and selling real estate

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the author is learning the wrong thing.

Software isn't about automating things, and certainly not about automating things 100%. It's about building tools to leverage people's times (in this context).

If you can build software that makes those folks doing those manual processes 30% more productive, then do so.

He has this idea that you should never build tools by default because automating them 100% is too costly. Automating them 100% may be too costly, stop trying to do that.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting perspective. I think he goes a bit overboard with saying that everything should be manual by default. Most business are not like real estate in terms of profits in dollars. I think that is giving them the opportunity to hire a lot of inexpensive workers to do all of these manual tasks. That and investment which is naturally attracted go real estate. Anyway it is a good point if a bit overblown in this case. Even internet businesses need tointeract with the real world and changing requirements in a fluid way and that means you can't always have the ultimate integrated automated system. Spreadsheets are very powerful.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone know why 42floors blog posts end up on the front page so often?

<comment><USER11> Not sure what you mean, i don't see them that much. And they had some good stuff, like about manual scaling: [http://blog.42floors.com/manual- scaling/](http://blog.42floors.com/manual-scaling/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think with many founders being software engineers themselves, they naturally steer away from manual solutions (and usually with good reason). But some problems, such as those faces by Uber and 42Floors, simply need manual solutions. That's why it's useful for software-oriented founders to also educated themselves in operations and management.

</comment><comment><USER13> > _Start with manual processes_

 _This actually goes for all companies. Early on, whenever you can replace code with a manual process, you should; if for no other reason than it can help you to iterate faster. We do it religiously at 42Floors. Everything starts manually. Save your precious engineering cycles for the times when you actually need it._

God, there needs to be a sexy phrasing of this, kind of like how quick- iteration-cycles has "Move fast and break things." Today, people are so dependent on computers that they seem to forget that there used to be a way to just _do things_ even without an app.

I've helped or consulted on various researching projects for fun, and it always pains me to hear a very smart person say something like, "I saw that there's a great Java library for sentiment analysis. Should we build our project on Java?"

Nevermind the layperson ignorance of software engineering evident in that question...my problem with this kind of question is _why do we need any kind of software to do "sentiment analysis"?_

The reason isn't self-evident...and if the questioner would just take the time to do "sentiment analysis" manually, as if no computers existed, what they actually _need_ would be easy to explain to a software engineer. And what I mean by "manually", I mean to take a sample of input and a spreadsheet, and then mark down the "sentiment" you yourself can detect by reading over each unit of input.

After an hour of that, you'll have a great idea of what you actually _want_ and _need_ , such as, what _kind_ of sentiment are you looking for? What is the granularity of sentiment, e.g. just "happy" and "angry"? Or do you need "Very happy/happy/neutral/unhappy/angry?" And if the latter, how did you, yourself, as a human, differentiate between an "unhappy" and "angry" input?

You may realize that you don't need very much granularity. Or that the kind of input you're analyzing, such as tweets, do not lend themselves very easily to accurate sentiment analysis...or, at the very least, will require certain tweaks in the software so as not to be thrown off by common styles of phrasing. Or you may find the input lends itself to having a nice loophole that greatly enhances how quickly you can judge sentiment, such as if your input sample tends to use a lot of emoji.

These are all computational thought processes that require no machine learning to just _do_ , that we as humans can do for ourselves, whether it's to efficiently prototype a machine learning model or because an EMP bomb just went off. As a programmer, I'm all for automating the hell out of everything, but it really irks me when people have no idea _how_ to automate something, nor have a reason _why_ something should be automated, and then hope that the machine (or its mercenary operator) can figure it all out for them.

<comment><USER14> I realized exactly this when I wanted to write a backup script for some of my client's websites.

My usual process had been to 'manually' backup using rsync, which was a matter of cutting and pasting the commands from a text document.

When automating, however, I realized I'd also have to check if certain files (db dumps) were present, and of course if the script itself succeeded.

I then realized that in this particular case, the simple cut and paste approach was perfectly fine, because: 1) it would take months for the time spent automating to be worth it compared to a quick cut and paste, and 2) it was much safer for me to quickly scroll back in my terminal and see if the particular files were present.

Now I wouldn't generally recommend my approach, but in context it made sense not to automate, and yet I felt a 'need' to automate anyways.

<comment><USER15> Automating is not just about speeding up the process; it's also a way of lowering the bus factor[1] of the process. What happens when you go on vacations, or you get sick? Do the websites stop being backed up?

Besides, you should always document your process, and writing a backup script doesn't really take much more time than a detailed description in English.

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

<comment><USER16> Exactly, writing down the steps should be the first step in automating a process. The order I do the steps are:

1\. Write down the directions to do the task 2\. Have someone else follow your directions. Any time you need to interrupt them because you missed something add a note or additional step 3\. See if any part (or the whole thing) is worth automating</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does ML research ever get translated to industry? - <AUTHOR> It seems like industry doesn't really use any of the recent advancements that come fresh from research, including things like capsule networks or advances in Neural Architecture search?<p>Is there a gulf between the release of cutting edge research and its commercialization? Couldn't many of these models be commercialized faster and be made available as enterprise products? <comment><USER2> Some reasons that come to mind:

1\. Most of the advances do not result in large enough gains to justify them being translated into industry. 99.9% of research papers propose techniques that result in small gains in the optimization metric (accuracy, ROC AUC, BLEU score, etc). However, this comes at the expense of added cost in complexity, more expensive training, model instability, challenges in code maintainability, and so on. For the vast majority of companies, unless you are Google AdWords or Google Translate, a tiny gain in metric X is not worth the costs mentioned above. You're much better off using proven off-the-shelf models that have stood the test of time, are fast to train and easy to maintain. Even if they are 1% worse.

2\. Research tends to focus on model improvements and you are not allowed to touch your train/test data. That makes sense as otherwise competing approaches would not be comparable. However, in the real world you have the freedom of collecting more training data, cleaning your data, selecting more appropriate validation/test data, and so on. The vast majority of times, getting better/cleaner/more data beats getting a slightly better model. And it's much easier to implement. So for industry it often makes more sense to focus on that.

3\. Metrics optimized in research papers rarely translate into real world business metrics, but many research ideas are overfit to those metrics and/or datasets. For example, translation papers optimize something called BLEU score, but in the real world the thing that matters is user satisfaction and "human evaluations", which cannot easily be optimized in research. Similarly, no business sells "ImageNet recognition accuracy". Research overfits to this metric on this dataset (because that's how papers are evaluated) but it's not obvious that a model doing better on this metric will also do better on some other metric or dataset, even if they are similar. In fact, even datasets that are known to contain errors are still used as-is, because they have always been used.

<comment><USER3> Interesting - I replied to your twitter post about this but I'll go ahead and say it here as well:

If you were starting a PhD in CS/ML right now, and you wanted to be as useful as possible primarily to industry (while still being impactful academically), would you focus on the theoretical aspects on those weaknesses you mentioned? (e.g. model maintainability, complexity, etc)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd also love to hear the answer to this :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that an important obstacle is that the industry and academy have different goals and therefore different motivations. We (researchers from Palo Alto Networks and Shodan), recently published a paper on machine learning challenges in cyber security, aiming to the academy. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.07858](https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.07858)

Finding problems that will be of interest to the academy wasn't easy. Taking algorithms that will be based on them and turning them into a product will be hard.

We explained why textbook machine learning will fail on these problem, what make it interesting academically. We also provide data for academic use, what enables academic research.

So far response is positive, so I hope that we found a way for academy- industry cooperation.

</comment><comment><USER5> When we talk about commercialisation, it almost always has to do with business performance improvement. When you're thinking about making a change to improve the performance of business, then you have to consider the benefits/risk ratio of your change (in this case, swapping for a better model).

Say your model only increases performance by 1%. It's unproven within the business and against the test of time. Not to mention someone generally needs to know how it works and maintain it. Someone needs to be responsible for the change and be able to explain why the new model is better (and will continue to stay better).

And generally businesses buy solutions not releases of models. There's a lot of additional work that goes into commercialising a model as a product than the actual model itself. I know because I've tried to do it before.

We are working on developing software that will let us be more agile with ML and rapidly release new models to compete with existing models, which will help us learn about the effectiveness of new modelling techniques and help us build business cases.

</comment><comment><USER6> Capsule networks don't work very well. Why would anyone want to use them in industry?

<comment><USER7> and Neural Architecture search is (currently) too computationally expensive for non-trivial problems

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Large enterprises need to have a faster research adoption cycle too. They need to do their bit. It's not all researchers fault. At least in my org (a very large conventional co ) our DL adoption is hardly beyond transfer learning, using CNNs as feature detectors. We lament lack of labeled data and there is tangible research in few-shot learning and semi-supervised learning to at least get us started. But we still don't do it. I do understand that it sometimes hard to conceptualize a product around some advanced in ML, eg GANs or RL, but there are way too many others that we can adopt without killing ourselves.

Enterprises should perhaps have a team / group that tries to fill the gap between research and adoptions.

</comment><comment><USER9> I beg to differ. Some ideas related to training methods of deep neural networks e.g binarized neural networks, asynchronous SGD are used in datacenter infrastructure see [https://research.fb.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/12/hpca-2018...](https://research.fb.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/12/hpca-2018-facebook.pdf). Some of the companies that I built in the past in Montreal uses SOTA research for sound event detection, a dropout method that friends and I co-authored were used in production at an NLP company (that I cannot disclose).

</comment><comment><USER10> Have a look at [http://cKnowledge.org/rpi-crowd- tuning](http://cKnowledge.org/rpi-crowd-tuning) and [https://portalparts.acm.org/3230000/3229762/fm/frontmatter.p...](https://portalparts.acm.org/3230000/3229762/fm/frontmatter.pdf) \- they also discuss a growing gap between academia and industry, and suggest some solutions.

</comment><comment><USER11> Because researchers have little incentives to commercialize their research, especially in academia. They take pride of this insulation from the 'real world'. That's the root cause why research metrics are different from industry metrics.

<comment><USER12> As someone who works in applied ML but tries to stay heavily on top of research, I think it's this. I am always stunned when I try to recruit people, talk with folks at conferences, or even look for jobs myself how few people care about commercialization. I've seen this attitude grow a lot in corporate R&D in recent years too as they pull in more academics with promises of independence from the "business grind".

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure that it is just lack of interest in commercialisation, though that does exist. I think that the academy and industry work in different scale. In the industry low risk short term project have high value. The academy aims for novelty which usually means high risk and longer terms. Companies that aim to high risk longer term are usually either start up that that project is their core or large companies that can afford failing 9 out of 10 projects and have the benefit form the others to return the investment in 5 years.</comment></comment></comment>


The Acer Swift 3 SF314 Notebook Review: Swift Gets Swifter with Ryzen 4000 - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/15762/the-acer-swift-3-sf314-review-swift-gets-swifter-with-ryzen-4000/ <comment><AUTHOR> I thought this might be interesting at the first review I've seen of a laptop with the new Ryzen 4700U processor. The battery life is a big improvement over the 3000 series, and it's certainly excellent for the 8-core performance. This particular laptop isn't terribly exciting, but it's decent for the price.</comment>


Everything on Social Media Is for Sale - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/young-artists-and-producers-embrace-micro-monetizing/576682/ <comment><USER2> Sad only if you considered these channels to be authentic in the first place.</comment>


Microsoft trashes its brand — with Apple the big winner - <AUTHOR> http://bigtin.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/microsoft-trashes-its-brand-with-apple-the-big-winner/

<comment><USER2> Have a look at Microsoft's sales figures for the past few quarters: <http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/10k_fh_fin.html>

They're still making money hand over fist despite having a lame duck OS and one of the worst economies in decades. Their revenue increased by $10 billion and had profits of $3.5 billion.

I really wish that people would look at these numbers before declaring doom and gloom for Microsoft. The market isn't exactly running screaming from Microsoft as some would hope.

<comment><USER3> Maybe its just me -- but I really don't see how this article is declaring financial doom and gloom for Microsoft, or saying that the market is running screaming from Microsoft? It just seems to be saying that enterprises aren't (yet) seeing a compelling case for upgrading from XP to 7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I work as a consultant for a lot of medium sized businesses and none of them have any intention of moving away from XP anytime soon. However, that does not imply that they want to move to any other operating system. The main reason they don't want to move away from XP is the support and training costs. Moving to OS X or Linux would be _even worse_.

All of these columnists miss the point -- OS X and Linux won't sell for exact same reason that Vista doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER5> _It's just a major shame that Apple's business model and contempt for its users is even less appetising than Microsoft's…_

Huh?

<comment><USER6> Note the blog tag line:

 _Big tin: IT infrastructure used by organisations to run their businesses._

So, I think this final sentence needs translation. For "Apple's business model", substitute "Apple's business model, which involves not caring much about the low-margin, high-grief corporate IT hardware business." And, for "contempt for its users", substitute "contempt for the people running corporate IT departments". (Remember, IT doesn't care about the people who _type_ on the computers. It's the people who _set up_ the computers who are the primary "users".)

I'm sure it really does suck to try and maintain Macs in a Windows-centric corporate environment. But it's not as if corporate IT has anyone but themselves to blame. They turned away from Apple in the _early 1980s_ and have never really looked back until now. Apple has learned to survive without their business and now has no real incentive to become the next Microsoft. Somebody else needs to step up and do that.

<comment><USER7> _low-margin, high-grief corporate IT hardware business_

Low-margin? I used to work at a large bank, and I recall Dell charged them some £25 for a plain USB optical mouse with just 2 buttons and a mouse-wheel. I'm sure many businesses could do with these kinds of margins.

<comment><USER6> Are you trying to tell me that Apple's equivalent USB optical mouse was _significantly cheaper_ than Dell's? That _would_ be a surprise.

Other questions to put this anecdote in perspective: Was that a list price or the result of a negotiation? What _were_ the competing products in the UK at the time, and why would a bank choose Dell if those products where significantly cheaper?

<comment><USER7> The bank's supplier for desktop computer hardware was Dell. If Dell could deliver it, it was ordered from Dell. There was no "choice". And yes, it was a list price, no negotiation involved.

There were plenty of competing products in the UK - I could have had a better mouse for cheaper by wandering down to PC World, down the road, and paying £10. But the corporate ordering process didn't allow me to get involved in that - all I could do was express the fact that I needed a mouse with a wheel.

<comment><USER6> _If Dell could deliver it, it was ordered from Dell._

Well, there you have it. If you are Dell and you secure that exclusive deal, you get to charge high margins on certain incidental products.

Of course, as has been pointed out by olefoo, to get a deal like that Dell probably had to give up a lot of margin on _other_ products. And throw in support contracts, and expend a lot of sales time...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't have an opinion either way on this Mac/PC thing however I do think that the marketing is quite interesting.

For many years Macs have been portrayed as "cool", with all the "Mac vs Pc" adverts as well as the indirect appeal from the iPod / iTunes advertising.

Microsoft have been quite clever at counteracting this in the new adverts this in my opinion. In their adverts, they're gently nudging the idea that Macs are one step up from cool; the implication is "Macs are _elitist_ " owing to the price differences making a purchase by "real-life people" imposible. Once this implication gets through to the majority of people, this starts to kill the trendiness factor.

Or am I over-analysing it?

</comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately for Apple, Microsoft doesn't need a brand. It already has millions of people who are locked in to applications that depend upon Microsoft software.

</comment><comment><USER10> Right back to the days of MS-DOS, every other OS version from Redmond seemed to garner contempt, only for the complainers to be mollified by the version that came after (and claim credit a la 'finally Microsoft has listened to what people like me have been saying since the release of FU-DOS 4.0...'). Vista hasn't been a failure for MS, just not an obvious success. 'Failure' brings to mind things like OS/2.

For >20 years now, I've just been in the habit of preferring the odd-numbered versions, and assuming that the even-numbered versions were meant as incubators for the next major shift (most recently, from 32 to 64 bit computing). At first I thought this was due to ham-handedness at MS, but nowadays I wonder if it isn't the actual strategy - the pattern has repeated so many times now, perhaps it's because it actually works for MS. Notice how aggressive advertising on Vista's behalf only began last year as W7 was going into beta.

Thus, I predict that Windows 8 will require a minimum of 2 cores, 16gb of RAM and a 1gb Graphics card, leverage virtualization technology for application switching and be decried as a hugely inefficient and pointless attempt to recycle server solutions onto the desktop for no good reason. When Windows 9 emerges, there will be many headlines of the 'Microsoft desperately needs to recover from the disaster that was Windows 8...' variety.

</comment><comment><USER11> The enterprises that are on Windows today aren't going to move to OS X anytime soon and this is why:

There is a huge barrier for enterprises to move to OS X, it is locked into Mac hardware.

Macs are extremely overpriced as compared to their PC counterparts: 30% - 50% more!

So for cost conscious enterprises, when they compare between the cost of upgrading to Windows 7 (which has had good reviews so far) with cost of buying new Apple hardware and OS X, Windows 7 turns out to be the winner.

<comment><USER6> _Macs are extremely overpriced as compared to their PC counterparts: 30% - 50% more!_

Do you have any analysis, or are you just spreading old FUD?

Here's a 2006 link finding that a Mac Pro was _cheaper_ than a comparably equipped Dell of the time. (Though, as you can see, you can spend all day arguing about what "comparable" means.)

[http://www.macworld.com/article/52540/2006/08/dellmacprofoll...](http://www.macworld.com/article/52540/2006/08/dellmacprofollowup.html)

Here's a 2007 Computerworld analysis:

[http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...](http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9023959)

Of course, the difference is that Apple simply stays out of low-margin markets. So it's definitely possible to get a box with "PC" stamped on it for much less money than the cost of any new Mac. The most conspicuous current example of a market which Apple does not deign to enter is the netbook market.

<comment><USER11> Definitely not into this for FUD :)

Also have no intention for starting PC brand war here. One can go visit a PC vendor's web site (say, dell) look at the notebook/desktop/workstation hardware configuration and prices and then compare with what one can find on say, Apple Store.

This year, I recently purchased a gateway laptop: <http://www.gateway.com/systems/product/529668231.php>

(17" HD display, 64 bit Intel Core 2 Duo 8400 2.26 GHz CPU, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, 320 GB 7200 rpm hard disk, NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800M GTS Graphics with 1GB of GDDR3 Discrete Video Memory).

I got this for $1270 after tax. For the same amount of money I also bought a Macbook: <http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html> (13.3" display, Intel Core 2 Duo CPU 2.0 GHz, 2 GB DDR3 RAM, 160 GB 5400 rpm hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory).

I would like to point out that I love both of these notebooks. I would give Apple extra points for build quality, fit & finish and better user experience. That said, one can very well see, item-by-item, how do the technical specs compare between the two mentioned here.

When a for profit company has to make a decision, cost of purchase becomes a big factor and that is the _only_ point I am trying to make here.

<comment><USER6> _Much_ better. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apple sells beautiful, fashionable and durable products worth every penny spent.

</comment><comment><USER13> I feared the day the pro-Apple kidiots would take over HN ...

This article tells us nothing we did not know, provides no meaningful insight, and then tells us in no-way-shape-or-form exactly hhhoooowwww Apple is bettering its brand.

To the Apple lovers: Notice how the tens of millions of corporate desktops are <i>sticking</i> to Windows XP. They aren't switching to Apple, and couldn't due to a lack of a proper Exchange client, nor advanced Active Directory features ...

I guess its too late for HN :^(

<comment><USER3> Could you clarify how you extrapolate from this article to "pro-Apple kidiots are taking over HN?"

To me it seems the article is only talking about trends and survey results, is not espousing any particular "Apple Love" and is not aiming to delve into the mechanics of how Apple is bettering its brand -- its merely making observation.

Your comment to Apple lovers really applies to Linux as well, so I'm not sure why you need to make the distinction.

I guess corporate users would generally move their desktops (either to the next version, or to something else) because they feel it creates extra value (maybe better stability, easier management or whatever), and this outweighs the cost of the change. Or, from fear that if they don't keep up, in future they may be stuck with a larger problem.

Corporate desktops that are sticking to XP aren't moving anywhere; not even to Vista/7. Obviously nobody is creating sufficient incremental value - yet. Thus, one really can infer nothing as to where they might end up migrating down the road.

Lack of "proper exchange client" or "advanced active directory features" (?) also probably doesn't mean much -- its not as if anyone has the "One True Way (tm)" of doing email, scheduling or ldap. Corps do walk away from Exchange/AD (or any other technology for that matter) if sufficient value is added overall.

<comment><USER14> Actually, the article seems to regret the way Microsoft looks like it's about to shoot itself somewhere very painful (after having already shot itself in the foot with Vista).</comment></comment></comment>


Patent law overhaul gets House panel OK - <AUTHOR> http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9746705-7.html <comment><USER2> It still sounds like the biggest corporations are making the rules. These reforms do almost nothing for smaller companies and individual inventors, and nothing to address the real harm that patents have done to the web, and the free and Open Source software world.

We need somewhat higher standards of novelty and non-obviousness, particularly on "business method" patents (if business method patents should even continue to exist).

</comment><comment><USER3> this is actually a better article than the one I submitted</comment>


Codex Seraphinianus - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus <comment><AUTHOR> Oops I didn't realize I posted this twice. Well, I thought the first attempt didn't make it. Sorry about that. Still learning. Always learning. Is there an end to learning?</comment>