South Korea has tested 140k people for the coronavirus. The US: 1,500 people. - <AUTHOR> https://news.yahoo.com/south-korea-tested-140-000-031000719.html <comment><USER2> > This suggests that, as many health experts have predicted, the virus' > fatality rate seems to decrease as more cases are reported.

A part of me wants to say "no shit. Fatality rate = death/known cases." Of course the rate goes down when the denominator increases. Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER3> What you are missing is the underlying point, the us has massively failed to organize and execute a good testing program. The country that spends by far more than other countries per capita on medical care (already well know as a big waster of money because of lesser outcomes), that has an advanced and extensive public health network, it failed to create and provide testing kits for the virus, and with much less resources South Korea (and Taiwan and Italy and almost every other country that tried) did more than 100 times more testing.

<comment><USER4> Specifically, the CDC bungled the response.

[https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/after-missteps- cd...](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/after-missteps-cdc-says-its- coronavirus-test-kit-ready-primetime-n1145206)

There are over 100 labs in the US that are able to develop these sorts of tests, but the CDC told them not to, and to wait for the CDC kit, which turned out to not work. The CDC also required such narrow criteria to get a test that few qualified. This meant many went untested.

How would this have been different than with a nationalized health system? It wouldn't.</comment></comment></comment>


Volunteers spot almost 100 cold brown dwarfs near our sun - <AUTHOR> https://www.space.com/citizen-scientists-discover-95-brown-dwarfs.html <comment><USER2> I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.

<comment><USER3> We can't ignore how this verse matches the tune of piano man. [https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/22/16919632/cthulhu- lovecraft...](https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/22/16919632/cthulhu-lovecraft- billy-joel-piano-man-cover-hp-joelcraft)

<comment><USER4> Aaand now I can't un-hear it. Thanks a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So a question for the knowledgeable on this subject. Over the last few years, we continually keep seeing discoveries large number of intra and extra solar system astronomical bodies that do not radiate at high luminosities or frequencies. Presumably all these add to the mass of galaxies.

How much of the dark matter hypothesis is dependent on observations of rotation of high luminosity bodies? If we assume there are large numbers of these non luminous bodies distributed between stars, does the necessity for postulating exotic dark matter go away?

<comment><USER6> Dark matter is going away, regardless, because it is not necessary to explain galaxy rotation curves. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL0ewiwqoTw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL0ewiwqoTw) Dark matter was always just a way to fudge what was observed. It is hard to believe most physicists, astronomers and cosmologists still believe in and are still looking for something that never existed.

<comment><USER7> My understanding is that MOND is essentially dead at this point and that there aren't any other promising alternative theories left on the table.

I enjoyed a podcast on the topic by the highly respected physicist Sean Carroll (along with his guest, MIT physicist Lina Necib). It was very interesting and insightful. They cover in-depth why we are so confident that dark matter is a thing that exists.

Here's a link to it: [https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/05/11/96-l...](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/05/11/96-lina- necib-on-what-and-where-the-dark-matter-is/)

<comment><USER6> Simulation in video I linked is not MOND. Dark Matter is postulated due to observations of galaxies in isolation. BUT galaxies are not gravitationally isolated. They gravitationally affected by all the other galaxies in their neighborhood. The video and simulation is pretty straight forward. Dark Matter is simply unnecessary to explain galaxy rotation curves.

<comment><USER7> Even if you are correct about the galaxy rotation curves -- which everything I've read and heard leads to me believe is rather unlikely -- those curves are only one of several pieces of evicence that point to the existence of dark matter. The wikipedia page list many of these: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evidence)

I only mentioned MOND as it is one of the more widely-known plausible alternatives that have been pursued.

<comment><USER6> And I and the video creators are only claiming dark matter is not needed to explain galaxy rotation curves. Whatever other spaghetti lumped into the need for dark matter, have at it... but galaxy rotation curves are explained quite neatly looking at two things: 1) dark matter was initially postulated and never reexamined because galaxies were observed as gravitationally isolated and 2) when not unnaturally gravitationally isolating galaxies from their neighborhood group, the rotation curves make precisely exact and perfect sense

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Near? (I read the article, it also seems not to know any actual distances).

<comment><USER9> On the very final page is a table of distances.

From 8 parsec to 70 parsec, so 28 to 250 light years or 240 trillion kms to 2170 trillion kms away (-ish)

Many are comparatively cold. While most seem to be 400 Celsius plus, one (couldn't find in the article, but mentioned elsewhere) seemed to be -10 Celsius.

Roughly (waving my hands and talking vaguely here) about 10% plus minus in distance and temperature.

<comment><USER10> So that's actually further away than the closest star systems. Got freaked out for a second, because having hard-to-see massive objects near your sun system is scary!

<comment><USER11> Why would it be scary?

<comment><USER12> In the scifi short story "a pail of air", the Earth is yanked away from the Sun by a dark star passing through the solar system. The Earth cools until all of the atmospheric gasses turn into solids and fall to the ground as layers of ultra-cold snow.

It's one of the pieces of fiction that left a deep impression on me. Harsh winter days still remind me of it.

[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51461](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51461)

<comment><USER11> I suggest basing your view of reality on facts, not fiction.

<comment><USER13> If 2020 has shown us anything, it's that some far fetched scenarios can actually happen.

<comment><USER14> What has happened in 2020 that was far fetched?

<comment><USER15> That our collective response to the pandemic could be so terrible.

<comment><USER14> The response of various countries mostly follows pre-pandemic approach of the respective governments to science, public services and making hard decisions. Personally, the only major surprise here is the level of defending the stock market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Credit where it's due, "Backyard Worlds" is one of a large number of "citizen science" projects hosted at Zooniverse[1]. The specific project is at [2], but the Zooniverse platform hosts many others affording pleasant hours of internet contribution.

[1][https://www.zooniverse.org](https://www.zooniverse.org)

[2] [https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard- wor...](https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-worlds- planet-9)

</comment><comment><USER17> What's the connection between the brown dwarfs being cold and being exoplanets? Are planets definitionally not hot, or does it tell us something about how the dwarfs formed?

<comment> T-hawk The definition of a brown dwarf is enough mass to cause nuclear fusion of deuterium (roughly 13x Jupiter's mass) but not enough for hydrogen-1 (roughly 75x Jupiter or 0.08x the Sun.)

Planets by definition are anything that doesn't meet the deuterium threshold. Stars meet the hydrogen threshold. "Cold" in this context means relative to hydrogen-fusing stars. It's referring to the object's own energy production, not like measuring the surface temperature of a planet illuminated by a star.

That we are finding "cold" brown dwarfs now is observational bias. We already found the hotter ones because they're more luminous and detectable. "Near the sun" (up to about 250 light-years here) is also observational bias, we just can't detect cold ones any farther.

<comment><USER2> I wonder what the ratio is of dark bodies to the star systems we can see? Are there vast numbers of invisible worlds hiding between the stars?

<comment><USER18> Yes, as far as I know, astronomers think so. Those are exoplanets. Planets without any nearby stars.

Even in our own solar system we don't know whats out in our Kuiper Belt. Probably nothing too big or we'd be able to measure the gravity effect.

But in the Oort cloud, we could have multiple Pluto sized things out there and have no idea.

<comment><USER19> An exoplanet is just any planet outisde our own star system. You're thinking of "rogue planets".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yay! Jump points! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_(Alliance%E2%80%93Union_u...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_\(Alliance%E2%80%93Union_universe\))

</comment><comment><USER21> The paper _Spitzer Follow-up of Extremely Cold Brown Dwarfs Discovered by the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Citizen Science Project_ [1]:

> We present Spitzer follow-up imaging of 95 candidate extremely cold brown > dwarfs discovered by the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project, > which uses visually perceived motion in multi-epoch WISE images to identify > previously unrecognized substellar neighbors to the Sun.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06396](https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06396)

</comment><comment><USER22> Are any of them situated in a place that would be useful to us for getting to other places?

</comment><comment><USER23> Which one is the mythical "Nemesis" that throws comets and asteroids at Earth?

</comment><comment><USER24> What does "cold brown" mean in this context? How can it be cold near the sun?

<comment><USER25> They are still several light years away from the sun, so "near" only on astronomical scales.

"Brown dwarf" is an object bigger than a usual planet, but not big enough to spark and sustain nuclear fusion in the core.

"cold" means "not hot enough to shine bright like a star".

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Could we live on a brown dwarf?

<comment><USER27> I imagine the gravity would be too strong?

<comment><USER2> Perhaps a floating colony like those proposed for Venus? There might be a Goldilocks zone in the atmosphere. If not then there may still be a comfortable location in near orbit where the heat would be tolerable. It's interesting to think of ways to overcome an extreme gravity environment though, perhaps suspension in a liquid would counteract some of the effects?

<comment><USER28> How would you float something in a hydrogen atmosphere?

<comment><USER29> Not float, but you can keep aloft while spending minimal energy using [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_soaring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_soaring)

Jupiter seems to have sufficiently dynamic atmosphere. Not sure about cold brown dwarfs...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This was misleading, they made it sound like they were inside our solar system.

<comment><USER31> Almost a Clickbait

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Misleading headline.

</comment><comment><USER33> If you look closely, you can often also spot a warm brown dwarf near Uranus.

</comment><comment><USER34> Should be noted that this kind of science in particular will be completely destroyed from satellite constellation launches from the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin.

[https://phys.org/news/2020-05-costly-collateral-elonmusk- sta...](https://phys.org/news/2020-05-costly-collateral-elonmusk-starlink- satellite.html)

With the amount of satellites being launched, it will be impossible not to have several in frame, especially over a long exposure, and they will swamp out pretty much any signal from space with their brightness.

<comment><USER35> You don't need long exposure now that we have digital cameras, it's better to stack many short exposures. It's trivial to throw out the outlier values which removes the satellite trails, and other sensor noise. Images with prominent streaks are being deliberately processed to only keep the bright outliers and delete the clean frames.

<comment><USER36> Also these observations came from the WISE satellite.

<comment><USER37> Will be far cheaper to launch many observation satellites in future too</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Let us code - <AUTHOR> I built a text chat app for learning programming: letzcode.com<p>This is meant to be a less cumbersome and more engaging way to introduce students to the basics of programming. <comment><USER2> I made a print screen for you. Look at it for 30 seconds: [http://imgur.com/Auo417n](http://imgur.com/Auo417n)

The problem is that it's too empty. I have no reason to click the "sing up" link.

You should add some explanation, many screenshots.

Perhaps a free easy activity that someone can try without signing up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Let me make that a navigable link so users don't have to copy and paste: [http://letzcode.com](http://letzcode.com)

You could have made this a URL-type rather than text-type submission and then added your explanation as a comment.</comment>


Compose.io no longer offer Mongodb sandbox environment for free - <AUTHOR> https://www.compose.io/pricing/ <comment><USER2> Well, IBM did buy them, so that was to be expected.</comment>


A Remote Attack on the Bosch Drivelog Connector Dongle - _-_T_-_ https://argus-sec.com/remote-attack-bosch-drivelog-connector-dongle/ <comment><AUTHOR> I went out of my way to buy a vehicle with no GSM chip built in whatsoever (that's not easy in 2016). Car companies care as little about protecting their tech as they care about trying to fix USAs lovely car dealership system.

I know this post is about a dongle, but you can remove a dongle from a car at least. You can't remove the GSM chip from most new cars that's uploading your location to heaven knows where and how many people have hacked their database this week.

<comment><USER2> Can't you disconnect / destroy the antenna?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I knew IOT devices generally have weak security, but I didn't anticipate them so easily being connected to physically dangerous objects like cars. I wonder how common this will become.

<comment><USER4> Most of trucks in europe have gps systems which connect to CAN in order to measure driver efficiency and vehicle condition. They are also connected via cellphone network to internet (only sometimes through APN, mobile equivalent of VPN). All of them have security holes, typically much worse than this dongle, just no one cared to look at them yet.

<comment><USER5> Wouldnt it be possible to have the CAN chip only send data to the iot microprocessor? So not attaching the Tx but only Rx. As far as I understand CAN it is a bus everything is dropped on, without an actual request-response system.

Now everything from the car could be read but nothing can be controlled.

<comment><USER6> This. One-way communication needs to make a comeback in a big way.

<comment><USER7> This is fundamentally impossible in a CAN bus, and is stupid and functionality-limiting anyway. Everyone likes it when the radio turns off when the ignition does, these systems need to be able to talk to each other to get the functionality you expect.

What you need is to move away from the non-authenticated bus paradigm entirely, to a network-based system where some devices may be assumed to be hostile (which is what you have, like it or not).

This inherently involves authentication and privilege systems, so that the pedal controllers can prove to the brake controllers who they are, so that when the radio/head unit tries to interface with the brake controllers the brake controllers can go "woah, hey, you're not supposed to be touching the brakes".

This at least would require escalation from a trivial system like the head unit to a more crucial system, which is a more typical model for exploits in computer OSs.

This is a workable threat model. "Trust everyone all the time" is no longer, and hasn't been since we allowed external connectivity to automobile systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is the Drivelog Connect even necessary?

"Drivelog Connect allows your car to speak to you. Your car directly connects with your smartphone. All the information becomes available at your fingertips."

Many of the features the app offers could be made available in the car's console/monitor.

Like: - automotive diagnostics, display of real-time driving behavior(should you really be looking at your Smartphone while driving), Logbook for recording and storage routes...

I don't really see benefit of this app.

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems to me that the main thing they could do that's cheap and easy is require a button press on the device to pair. Unfortunately that's not as simple as a firmware update.

</comment><comment><USER10> Actually, I was impressed how much security Bosch included in their device.

For a IoT device I would give this a gold star. I am sure after this report was given to them, they patched their firmware.

<comment><USER11> I dunno...the dongle gives up it's certificate so that you can brute force it offline. It's an 8 digit numeric only pin. 100 million possible PINS, when you can do 100 million SHA-256 computations in 30 minutes on a typical laptop. That seems unwise.

And it allows you to send and receive any CAN bus message you want, versus just some subset of OBDII. As far as I can tell, the features don't require anything other than querying OBDII for some very small subset of data. So if the dongle only passed those request packets, and dropped everything else, it would be miles more secure. Since it appears to be a simple passthrough device, I'm not sure there's enough horsepower in the dongle to fix that with firmware.</comment></comment>


The Treason of the Ruling Class - <AUTHOR> https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/02/treason-ruling-class <comment><USER2> The despair and anger is palpable.

But, hating your neighbor as a far-right bigot because they want to protect their farm or factory (which feeds and clothes you, by the way) may be ... shortsighted.

While we depend on these oligarchs' financial system, we can rail all we want — impotently. If you want to crush the oligarchs, crush their false and unconstitutional money.

However, many may be disappointed to discover that producing the food, clothing and products needed for survival requires, you know, learning, effort and generations of focus! A group that plans to loot their way to success may be disappointed...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I mean populist revolutions rarely work out well. But he's not recommending a violent revolution, he's just pointing out what's happening.</comment></comment>


We Analyzed 100M Flight Searches. Here's How to Get the Cheapest Flights - <AUTHOR> https://www.marksflights.com/blog/we-analyzed-100-million-flight-searches-heres-how-to-get-the-cheapest-flights/ <comment><USER2> Off-topic: what is the deal with articles that have giant GIFs after each paragraph? I get it, it is supposed to be funny, but it becomes annoyance very soon. One or two is fine, but not a myriad. Also, when at work, makes me make close the page faster. /rant

<comment><USER3> [https://outline.com/https://www.marksflights.com/blog/we- ana...](https://outline.com/https://www.marksflights.com/blog/we- analyzed-100-million-flight-searches-heres-how-to-get-the-cheapest-flights/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So I guess the tl;dr is if you have time/flexibility to burn on a really long trip there's ways to find cheaper flights. If you can fly in or out of a distant airport it'll be cheaper. If you can fly on different days or different times it'll be cheaper. Also good, use a VPN to search for flights from other countries.

So, useful advice if you're going far far away and have plenty of time to spend.

</comment><comment><USER5> How did this post get 7 points in 3 minutes _and_ get to the front page? (i.e. not triggering the voting ring detector)

<comment><USER6> NomadList users are active on HN?

<comment><USER5> Did NomadList draw attention to/advocate upvoting this submission? Could you send me a link/screenshot of that?

<comment><USER6> I don't have a nomadlist memberhsip.

I do all sorts of travel points hacking, I assume there's a bunch of other people on HN who do too.

<comment><USER5> I'm not questioning the fact that it got upvoted, just the rate, which is only realistically possible if you draw attention to a submission.

Even big company announcements don't get upvotes that quickly.

(of course, it's counterproductive, as drawing such attention when it's not deserved draws flags, which is what happened in this case)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow. Finding a good deal on flights involves a ton of work. The packages tip is a good one

<comment><USER8> Sockpuppet accounts and/or promotional comments will get you banned here, so please don't.

HN users usually see through it, making it against your interests anyhow.</comment></comment>


Humans Are Suddenly Getting Better at Tetris - <AUTHOR> https://kottke.org/18/11/why-are-humans-suddenly-getting-better-at-tetris <comment><USER2> i really wanted to come up with some sort of pun to do with tetris effect having been recently released but my brain just isnt on form this morning</comment>


Tell HN: 9 weeks to go and the event I'm running now has 20 paid up attendees - <AUTHOR>

I've mentioned it a few times here, and a few people have been kind enough to email and take an interest, so I thought I'd let you know.
Currently 140 people on the mailing list, with 20 people having paid real money into my account.  Running ahead of break-even, and on target to fill to capacity.
Exciting ride. <comment><AUTHOR> In response to the obvious question: <http://www.mathsjam.com>

Thanks davidw for reminding me that I should actually mention it.

ADDED IN EDIT: If anyone wants to offer advice on techniques for converting mailing list people to paying punters I'd be interested. I'm sure the advice would be more generally applicable.

</comment><comment><USER2> Cool - what event is it?</comment>


China's stock market crash: A red flag - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/07/chinas-stockmarket-crash <comment><USER2> Limitations on short selling always concern and perplex me. Why is that a good idea? Isn't that preventing the market from properly adjusting to whatever circumstances have occurred, or new information that has arrived? Limitations like this feel like "Let's all pretend that the truth isn't true".

It astonishes me that in this day and age there are still so many arbitrary controls on marketplaces, such as the Greek stock markets shutting down due to their financial crisis. Isn't it important for the market to adjust and properly accommodate those events? (If the market simply cannot function due to the crisis itself, then that makes sense. I assumed it was shut down because people are afraid of how prices will change as a result.) Sure, some people might panic in an unreasonable way, and if they do, they will get taken to town by other people who go long during the same time period. Just like people who are overly confident will be taken to town by short sellers if there's a bubble and it bursts.

I understand why there are controls on the marketplace like around prohibiting naked short selling, or reversing transactions that were obviously erroneous, but controls like preventing short selling seem absurd. If someone wants to bet that prices will decrease, let them! That's an important signal and an important correction to the market. Perhaps we would have fewer market bubbles if there was more continuous correction.

Is anyone working on a bitcoin-based stock market with no limitations on trading? Could such a thing be legal? Perhaps actual shares of stock are not being traded, but rather some other kind of financial instrument that represents the right to the upside or downside of some shares without having to own them, but you own the upside or downside. Then the idea would be that anyone can buy these instruments using currency or bitcoin on a market that operates differently than today's conservative markets.

I imagine this is probably illegal for a variety of reasons, such as "know your customer", but it's interesting to think about. How would the stock market be different if trades were unregulated, in the sense that there are no limitations on buying and selling shares. It operates 24/7 and never shuts down no matter what happens, and never imposes constraints on selling or short selling. I imagine this market would need to operate as a central authority or federation of trusted brokers (someone needs to verify that the seller actually owns the shares they've promised to deliver), but the authority or brokers would be willing to transact in both regular currency and bitcoin. Would this be a more effective market, or a dysfunctional one, and why?

<comment><USER3> This would be true if people always behaved like Econs, not Humans. In normal times, the mass market averages out irrational behaviour (and there's less of it when things are calm) - but, occasionally the herd stampedes. Perhaps it's better in these cases to slow the panic until things calm down and people start behaving more rationally again.

There are also cases where people individually rationally maximizing their individual financial interests is, collectively, devastating for society as a whole.

Continuous adjustment sounds great, but sometimes we get crashes, which aren't.

<comment><USER4> It's curious that there's only intervention in the markets when they're tanking. If the underlying reason for the intervention is to prevent irrational behaviour then where was the regulator when the price was going up like wildfire? Surely it should work both ways?

<comment><USER5> There are many, many regulations that limit the rise of the markets, the most obvious being the limits put in place on credit and margin. All Western governments intervene in the various stock markets, everyday. That's been true since at least the 1930s. The interventions are sometimes direct, but are more typically indirect.

These last 40 years there has been a movement afoot, especially in the English speaking nations, to weaken the controls that limit the spikes, up and down, in the market. There may be some advantages to this policy, but there are also many disadvantages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note: I'm not an economics expert by any means, so go easy on me :)

I'd just like to ask why in situations like this, governments tend to intervene? In the long term, wouldn't it actually be better to let the market just naturally figure itself out? That way the end prices reflect the real value.

<comment><USER7> A free market can't handle limited liability. It's only government intervention that can provide things like orderly bankruptcy proceedings. If the government is obliged to be a lender of last resort then it seems reasonable for it to take less binary steps before that eventuality.

<comment><USER8> > A free market can't handle limited liability. It's only government > intervention that can provide things like orderly bankruptcy proceedings.

Obviously. And it's the government that actually establishes the free market, regulates it, and provides all the surrounding infrastructure (roads, police, courts, ...).

A "free market" doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want - the name for that is "anarchy". Free market only means that everybody is free to compete under equal terms. Additionally, governments would step in if a single player got too powerful and would exert its power in ways that would undermine competition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The _Los Angeles Times_ reporting about the first two days of trading this week in China[1] is also interesting for perspective on how the stock market in China influences the broader economy of China. The key idea is that the current situation, even WITH government intervention, is very likely to severely hurt the personal savings of a lot of households in a country with a strong tradition of personal savings. That could turn many well educated, high-earning people who were previous supporters of the Communist Party of China leadership of China into doubters about their government or even regime opponents.

The CNN report based on official media reports from China strongly suggests many economic upheaval from the current intervention in the stock market in China.[2] The most dynamic and innovative companies in China are those most likely to be unable to raise further investment funds.

[1] "It's a bumpy ride for China's stock market investors"

[http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-stock- market-2...](http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-stock- market-20150707-story.html)

[2] "Nearly 25% of Chinese stocks have stopped trading"

[http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/07/investing/china-stock- market...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/07/investing/china-stock-market- companies-stop-trading/)

</comment><comment><USER10> The shadow banking sector in the mainland worries me more than anything else in this emerging situ. It is an information problem, but magnified by the potential for political distortion or simple opacity. In freer societies, the issue is merely a gap between expectations and emerging reality, and we know how extreme even that can get.

A lot of firms may be severely impacted by this share price collapse, both financial and non. More alarmingly, "shadow" bank failures may occur unseen, or structural problems that would normally be covered or speculated about by the media suddenly rear their head. We may only find that large sources of financing vanish long after the fact.

Many expect the CCP to swoop in and save the day, but perhaps it chooses to not do so, or do something more extreme than changing some rules or commanding the buying of shares in the big indexes.

</comment><comment><USER10> How to get a read on mainland stock prices:

Over the years I have used FXI to watch general stock prices in China. But FXI only indexes the large cap stocks listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Since the mainland stocks began reversing after the extreme price rise, I found the Shanghai stock exchange composite to be far more useful than FXI. To get the current price, use "Deutsche X-Trackers Harvest CSI 300 China A-Shares ETF":

[https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSEARCA%3AASHR&ei=Uj6cVcG4...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSEARCA%3AASHR&ei=Uj6cVcG4AsjFigKxxJKgAQ)

Any ideas about how to easily get the price on an index covering the Shenzen stock exchange?

<comment><USER11> SICOM:IND and SZCOMP:IND?

[http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SICOM:IND](http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SICOM:IND)

[http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SZCOMP:IND](http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SZCOMP:IND)

<comment><USER10> Excellent -- thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Inevitably, whenever The Economist (or the press in general) latches onto a markets story, it's because everything is already in the price. Shorts should be taking profit here, because the journos are usually the last to know. Recall, this is the paper which wanted to sell gold at 300, and wanted to sell oil at 11.

<comment><USER13> Bet you $5.

<comment><USER12> Bet me what? That SHANCOMP will go lower from here? And I assume you already know that your payout will be skewed: options price in a higher chance of downside than upside already so you should probably pay me $7 if it rallies against my $5 liability if it falls. Point is: this "China is tanking" idea is on everybody's lips and the surprise risk is now a rally.

<comment><USER13> > our payout will be skewed: options price in a higher chance of downside than > upside already so you should probably pay me $7 if it rallies against my $5 > liability if it falls

No doubt, but the market in Hacker News Shanghai Composite side-bets is not big and liquid so you may not be able to find someone to offer you $7, and if you're that confident in your thesis you should be willing to accept $5 in that case. ;) It's OK though, I'll go to $7.

(I didn't downvote you btw.)

<comment><USER12> Looks like I owe you five bucks (as of 8am London time) ;-)

Assuming $2.50 market in upvotes, duly upvoted you twice! ;(I'll wear two downvotes if you want to be strict about it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How can we, as North Americans, profit from China's demise? Is there a Chinese index that I can short? Because it sure as shit not going to go back up, not after the recent announcement of buying up bad chinese stocks.

<comment><USER12> Just sell some aussie dollar or for the brave, buy USDZAR. Much more liquid than the stocks, and exposed to all the second order factors which are already priced into stocks but not yet into the the implications for currencies: lower commoditiy prices, structurally lower demand for Australia's output, less Asian capital investing in the country.

The ZAR angle gives you exposure to a possible slowdown in the huge Chinese investment in Africa, plus the dire politics in SA. The downside is people are already short the unit.

<comment><USER14> I also thought about shorting Canadian banks, especially Vancouver, the joke is that there's not many corporations traded on stock exchange, but I feel like the Chinese economy crashing would send ripples here where Chinese money is keeping BC afloat, especially when the real estate bubble here pops, we will see vast majority of homeowners using debt to make payments default.

<comment><USER12> Yep decent strategy I would think. The idea is to find the second order implications which are not yet priced in. The first order "China is slowing down" is already in the price of the pureplay indices, and as you point out above, the implied downside vol is now much higher than the upside as a result.

<comment><USER15> Playing the collateral damage is always a wise strategy to consider, but it's also worth considering the possibility that the decline has a lot further to go.

In hindsight, prices today might look like ideal entries for short positions months from now if this is just the beginning of a major decline. In markets like this, no action should be taken without a thorough fundamental and technical analysis. Making an ill-researched assumption one way or the other will cause a lot of people on both sides of the market to lose money.

<comment><USER12> Both sides cannot lose money simultaneously, by construction of the financial markets. +1 - 1 will always equal zero. Not -2.

If your point is that "it always goes back to the fundamentals" and therefore fundamentally-driven investors will always win in the long run, I put to you that there is so much accumulated capital over centuries in Europe, that the ECB can wield this to fight the fundamentals for far longer than you can stay solvent.

Consequently:

When we're in a regime-shift scenario, as now, fast decision making is a much better value-adding skill than weeks of fundamental analysis which can be swept aside at the whim of a policy maker.

Therefore I completely disagree with you. Those who are currently holding on to fundamental analysis are losing money hand over fist in a market which values connections and reading of policy maker tea leaves. I give you as evidence, the EURUSD exchange rate. Here is the most liquid series on earth, and one which is barely moving on fundamentals, namely the existential crisis which the euro itself is facing. It is manipulated and no amount of conscientous fundamental analysis will help. Instead fundamentals will just bog you down in irrelevant detail and a false identification of the drivers. Techs, positioning, and fast moving gut feel is what matters in this market.

Basically: there is no definitive winning formula in finance. You have to use your instinct and flit between strategies as the state of the world requires. Sometimes that's fundamentals. Right now it isn't.

<comment><USER15> > Both sides cannot lose money simultaneously...

You're being far too literal here my friend.

The instruments you use, your timing, horizon, leverage, money management, etc. all affect your ability to _realize_ gains, even if your overall investment or trading thesis is correct. For instance, I could be on the right side of a trade but a margin call could screw it all up.

When all is said and done, people playing China long and people playing China short will both end up losing money during this volatile period. Not because they were all wrong about what was going to happen but because many of them won't be positioned perfectly or have the wherewithal to see their positions through.

> If your point is that "it always goes back to the fundamentals" and > therefore fundamentally-driven investors will always win in the long run

I wrote "In markets like this, no action should be taken without a thorough fundamental and technical analysis." How in the world did that lead you to conclude that I was arguing "'it always goes back to the fundamentals' and therefore fundamentally-driven investors will always win in the long run"? Why did you completely ignore my reference to technicals? It seems you're searching for an argument that doesn't exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> First Greece, then China, coming up soon is Puerto Rico, is the US next?

</comment><comment><USER17> yes just like 'murica's debt. command economies don't play by any given set of rules. they make their own rules. as long as there is demand in the world for chinese goods, the chinese economy will continue to function.

<comment><USER18> I don't know how much that's true.

China's current economy is built on the impact of its 1-child policy on its historical culture of children taking care of elderly parents: that's really really hard to do now, so everyone saves like crazy, and the government uses those savings (in state-run banks) to finance state-run industries with below- zero real interest rates, which are of course wildly profitable, and the plutocratic elite splurges on its take of the surplus.

But they really need to watch out for a number of shocks, of the whole scheme could fall apart badly and spark social unrest. In particular, inflation (eating away at those savings) sometimes leads to riots, and their monetary policy has been very extreme for many many years. (In different ways than US policies, but still, makes "Helicopter" Ben Bernanke's interventions look like the amateur leagues.)

Economists continue to worry and it's not 100% clear that China will continue to function after a real economic crisis. They might, but it's really hard to tell (they're so opaque it makes detailed analysis impossible).

<comment><USER17> What if I was to tell you that all the money that you deposit in the banks is not used for anything. The banks borrow money using a credit lending window from the central banks. They can get as much money as they want. Money doesn't actually exist. It's a virtual method of coercion to get people to do things. As long as there are things for Chinese people to do, the Chinese economy will keep running. As long as China can source raw materials and sell them for a markup to someone else, the Chinese economy will keep running. At the end of the day even if robotics threatens the Chinese economy, the government can step in and stop robotics from destroying jobs. That's the level of control they have. Any problems that they will have economically, everyone else will have first.

Most of these pundits that run Western economies follow rules that they themselves make up, and then use those rules to control other people. But China don't play these games homie, China knows the game homie. China make its own rules.

<comment><USER19> China may make its own rules, but reality gets a veto.

I'm perfectly even-handed with that assessment... it 100% applies to _any_ economy, of any form.

<comment><USER17> > but reality gets a veto.

Are the Chinese working as hard as American workers? Are they productive people that produce a lot of economic output? If the answer is yes, then there is nothing reality can do for you.

<comment><USER19> I was talking about reality, not my opinions about reality. Real reality, if I must qualify it. Where logic and reality part ways, reality wins. China may make all the rules it likes, but reality stays real.

If you are dismissive of reality's impact on, ah, reality, well, I appreciate your candor, but please don't be surprised that I just mentally dropped your credibility score to zero.

<comment><USER17> I don't know what you are rambling about? What are the real constraints in an economy? Resources. That's about it. Everything else is virtual.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stanford Geneticist Stops Diabetes in Its Tracks - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/03/examining-his-own-body-stanford-.html

<comment><USER2> Despite the sensational title, the article itself makes no mention of "stopping diabetes in its tracks"; merely tracing the emergence of diabetes.</comment>


Comprehensive PHP Security Checklist - <AUTHOR> http://www.sk89q.com/2009/08/definitive-php-security-checklist/ <comment><USER2> This list includes a lot of PHP and web application security items, but is missing some topics and is light on how to properly handle situations. A few of the topics missing important information include:

      - Pseudo-random number generator issues
      - Email injection
      - Cross-site session transfer
      - Password hashing

I recently did a talk on PHP security at the Boston PHP Meetup, and my slides are available at <http://wbond.net/security/>. <http://flourishlib.com/docs/Security> includes more information about many of the topics I covered with links to learn more.

<comment><USER3> Stream of consciousness post here. For your first bullet, people should be aware of mt_rand()'s superiority to rand(). For your fourth bullet, people should be aware of hmac. (Am suggesting that awareness of these should be a necessity, though not sufficient for some purposes.)

Edit: Just read your powerpoint - it's a wonderful overview, with brief code samples. People getting started with this broad topic should definitely give it a read. And now I'm sad I missed your live talk a few weeks ago.

<comment><USER4> For the first bullet, I usually just do the following:

      dd if=/dev/urandom ibs=1000 count=1 2>/dev/null | tr -dc '0-9' | fold -w[number of digits you need]

For the fourth, I agree with wbond: use bcrypt when possible.

Also, slide 27 should probably say 'fingerprint' in the second section.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Use a "safe" encoding for your page (such as ISO-8859-1) or otherwise verify that the content of inputted data to see if it valid (including if you use UTF-8). This is because certain invalid character sequences can cause the next character(like < (!)) to be ignored in some encodings."

Could anyone elaborate on this? What are the 'dangers' of UTF-8 exactly? The author suggests that certain UTF-8 characters can mess with the markup. How?</comment>


Show HN: My first iOS app: FrameParty (snapchat + photo frames) - <AUTHOR> https://frameparty.com/

<comment><USER2> I like the concept! Because you need friends who also have installed FrameParty, I think that an "invite friends" function right in the app would help. I was hoping to be able to send an app download link to a couple of Facebook friends. For now, I have to leave the app to tell them to search for it in the app store, download it, then tell me what their username is. If you could streamline this process somehow, I think that you'd see more signups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! That's definitely on the roadmap (probably the next thing I'll work on). Facebook for sure, maybe Twitter as well?</comment></comment>


Benefits of a week-long media fast - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjUpDHbhk5U

<comment><USER2> Last night I talked with someone who did a weekly media fast for most of her life, otherwise known as Shabbat. Great way to think about taking a break and getting back to what matters.</comment>


Ask HN: Which cryptocurrencies do you think will succeed and why? - <AUTHOR> I'm not asking for investment/speculation advice, just curious what cryptocurrencies people on HN think have a chance to make it in the long term.<p>I'll leave the definition of "succeed" open-ended. <comment><USER2> Bitcoin, hands down.

SegWit will activate soon and after that we'll get things like lightning with super fast / cheap transactions and no more waiting for transactions to get confirmed.

I think we'll see a lot more mainstream use after LN and the price will either skyrocket or stabilize as a result.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bitcoin because it was first.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would invest in a few storage coins, there are 2-3 major ones depending on who you ask. I wont list them here, do some research put a little into 2 of the ones you think are best. Your guess is as good as mine.

I would note that I have investments in 2 of the largest storage coins.

</comment><comment><USER5> Bitcoin.

1\. Because it was first .

2\. Because it's got a strong ecosystem .

3\. Because a lot of new ones are scams, pump and dumps or unreliable.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hasn't Bitcoin already succeeded? I think it will prevail, although very different from what it is now.

Also, Ethereum or its successor, as it's designed for autonomous applications (dapps)

</comment><comment><USER7> The first to get 1000 transactions per second at a reasonable fee without consuming the energy of a small country.

<comment><USER8> Yes. Succinct answer that brings cryptocurrency's problems to the surface. Only when this is solved will it be practical to largely abandon fiat and I simply cannot wait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Over what period, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, 500 years, 1000 years?

</comment><comment><USER10> Unfortunately, I broke my crystal ball already...

</comment><comment><USER11> Why not Ethereum?</comment>


Future of Internet Marketing - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/future-of-internet-marketing-de6cb5fcb1fc <comment><AUTHOR> With the power of progressive technologies like AR, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT, and of course with the unconquerable amount of data, marketers can do anything from immersive targeting to desirable selling.

It was an amazing shift for me from only writing and publishing content to taking efforts toward marketing them online. Though it seemed like a radical turn around, I pretty much managed to scrupulously lay the path.

#BoringHardshipStory

Let's agree to the fact, Back in time, writers were demanded to shiploads of content out only to be left unread.

Well, none of us knew that writers had the power to write as well convert! Did we?

It came as a shocker, when with no fiscal investment (we didn't have Adwords or any other fancy marketing tool back then), with shaky sales calls made, with the dull websites up, businesses were able to convince and convert their clients!

How? Thereafter, content led the conversion process. I still doubt if the content were crafted like poems in a little primitive time?!

Breaking the endless enigma, What is marketing? Where you promote your service/product. What are sales? Where you do selling for money.

We aren't living in a barter system economy. Yes, we don't swap stuff and make fortune out of it.

Peek Into The Future Of Online Marketing:

Contextual marketing to Immersive marketing Online marketing is on the verge of imploding and giving rise to an entirely different business model. With the number of emerging technologies, the online marketing is making a quick shift from contextual marketing to immersive marketing (Yeah).

For instance, the inclusion of social media to our interaction stream has changed the way we stay connected with each other in our daily life. Plus the fact that they all can be accessed through just out the phone. And as the whole world has come online, seems like there is nothing else but through the digital medium, our life shall change as we wish!

Take a look at the new innovative technologies those we will soon get exposed to. They certainly are going to take the burden off our shoulder by revolutionizing the way the online marketing works right now.

Introducing… AR (Augmented Reality)

Augmented Reality within e-commerce As huge as it may sound, Augmented Reality is starting to change how marketers use gamification for their products.

Remember how Pokemon Go roped in the AR tech and had us caught in its fad rage?

It pretty much gave us an idea about the future of human-software interactions. Meaning, the point where the physical and digital environment will meet each other for betterment. And with some of the recent launches from futuristic companies like Google and Apple — Google's AR core for Android to Apple's iPhone 8 — X specially purposed to support AR, gives us a clear picture.

What will the intrusion of AR within marketing look like?

Back in 2010, how apps were battling for user attention, with the AR's ability to make things jazzy by just the rear lens focused onto the objects will again resume the app war or WOP (War Of Products).

Within Marketing…

Immersive Experience Before Purchase

Checkout Modiface. Modiface is a no-brainer (self-explanatory by its name). It lets a user use its AR application to try out beauty products before making any actual purchases.

VR (Virtual Reality) and Online Marketing

Virtual Reality Gear to experience immersive visualisation

Virtual Reality and Internet Marketing shall do great by enhancing the visual/video marketing and in specific will level up the transmission of video. Though VR technology requires a slightly heavy budget as of now, its benefits as a business and also as a user is enormous. Several tutorials on VR technology by Facebook for pushing out Oculus Rift. And with the emergence of revolutionary VR world, as users might expect a different product experience, businesses must offer unique experiences to users even before they ask for it. Would be well off if marketers opt it earlier before users get overly exposed to it.

For example, let's take the most immersive visual experience from Jaguar made for the recent past Wimbledon Championship. In it, you will fly above a maze- like CG construction of the Wimbledon site to get dropped into the centre of the court during the match's high time.

Who did the voice over? Andy Murray!

VR driven campaign by Jaguar featuring Andy Murray killing it in the recent past Wimbledon Match High Point: The experience ends as you get into the body of Andy while slamming that damn match point!

CAUTION: Never overdo technology and manners. People hate it.

Wearable Technology

Wearable technology will help improve our health in a greater extent

With the extremity of wearables we use currently, it's either making our daily life convenient or pushing businesses towards the edge of death by data! Well, the power of IoT is huge and intricate. The rise in the usage of wearables, such as Apple Watches will prominently help businesses target their creative adverts to the target audience on-time, based on the wearers early shopping experiences/online behaviour.

Check: The customized adverts have to be more personalized and creative to reap complete benefit out of the wearers. Fact: An average person checks his smartwatch 85% more than he checks his smartphone.

Seems like there are way more opportunities for marketers and businesses to get chosen by the multitude of users.</comment>


Swedish ISP Protests Site Blocking by Blocking Rightsholder's Website Too - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/swedish-isp-protest-site-blocking-by-blocking-rightsholders-website-and-more-181102/ <comment><USER2> Kudos for balls.</comment>


Ask HN: How come there are 13 submissions of "The day I became a millionaire" - <AUTHOR> https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20day%20I%20became%20a%20millionaire%20(medium.com)&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story<p>I thought multiple submission were caught. <comment><USER2> There are exceptions like if an article was voted up enough it is possible to post another link to it later on.

I'm really learning this as I go as I caught an article that was what I thought was a dupe, but it was allowed to be reposted. I was voted down for saying it was a dupe.

I posted a link that someone else already submitted, and I didn't know it was submitted already and then when I went to post a few days later about a bug fix in ReactOS I got the "Whoa slow down you're submitting too fast!" message. So I must have done something wrong with a dupe link and lost submitting link privileges. I apologize for that. I searched for the link before submitting it and didn't see it. Then when I did submit it, it was already submitted by someone else.

It is a part of Hacker News that I am struggling with understanding as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> a) the algorithm was changed to allow multiple submissions if none has attracted discussion (I don't know if it limits the rate of submissions or not)

b) medium appends these random characters at the end, making the URLs different

<comment><USER4> In the past, people have added additional data to URL's in order to manually submit duplicates. If the submission algorithm was changed to handle multiple submissions differently, perhaps it was because it was already happening and encouraged a context of "gaming the system"...or not.</comment></comment>


Facetime for Mac is now $0.99 - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/facetime/id414307850?mt=12&ls=1

<comment><USER2> $0.99 is nothing really, if you've already bought into the Apple ecosystem. It's just a nice way to drive people into the app store and make sure they have a credit card on file :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Your title is confusing... Facetime for mac has just appeared, right? To say it's "now $0.99" doesn't make sense to me, unless I'm missing something.

But yes, why the hell are they charging for facetime at all?

<comment><USER4> My guess is it will be included with new Macs for free going forward, and only costs for existing Macs. Not sure, though, and doesn't seem to be a wise decision to charge for it in my opinion.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Server-Side Tracking Without Cookies in Go - <AUTHOR> https://marvinblum.de/blog/server-side-tracking-without-cookies-in-go-OxdzmGZ1Bl <comment><USER3> I once built a cookie-less tracking app without using IP address or user agent. The idea came from this[0]. It would serve a file to the user with an etag that let the browser cache the file for an indefinite period of time (effectively acting as a cookie but not being classified as one). There might be some quirks as the caching behaviour is not guaranteed (I think the caching is discretionary to the browser based also on the available cache). But it is an interesting approach to use something that is similar to a cookie but technically isn't.

Also user agents are not unique[1] but combined with IP addresses should be pretty safe to assume the fingerprint generated from both is.

[0] [https://lucb1e.com/rp/cookielesscookies/](https://lucb1e.com/rp/cookielesscookies/) [1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/tracking-by-user- agent](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/tracking-by-user-agent)

<comment> vertex-four The cookie law covers evercookies like this, so it's not a way to get around that or the GDPR, just around people who turn cookies off.

<comment><USER3> didn't know that - <USER2>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Here are the parameters used by Pirsch to generate a fingerprint:

> * the IP is the most obvious choice. It might change, as IPs are reused by > ISPs as they only have a limited pool available to them, but that shouldn't > happen too frequently

> * the User-Agent HTTP header contains information about the browser and > device used by the visitor. It might not be filled though, but it usually is

A couple of questions:

1\. Does anyone know of a decent Firefox plugin that can subtly change the User-Agent string for each new tab? I'm not thinking changing it to a different browser rendering engine string but maybe add a random key like

        hash-buster/$randomstring

2\. Isn't Chrome making its User-Agent string static? (ref: [https://www.osnews.com/story/131177/google-is-seeking-to- dep...](https://www.osnews.com/story/131177/google-is-seeking-to-deprecate- chromes-user-agent-string/)). @marvinblum (looks like you're the maintainer?) wouldn't this then skew your results?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh well that's sound bad for my solution. I'm unsure how well it would work with just the IP, but it's possible to add more headers, like the accepted languages and file types. If you really need precise tracking you probably won't get around tracking on the client side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure if I missed some other explanation around IP addresses, but aside from rotating IPs from ISPs this would have trouble in shared networks where people use the same browser and/or OS so the IP and agent string would be the same. Say, an office or home network. Any way around this using other data perhaps? Not dissing, just curious as to the server analytics space atm. With Chrome taking most browser traffic and Windows for desktop OS (Android on mobile, globally) there may be frequent false positives as such. Best next assumption as a "solution" is that one wouldn't expect all network users to visit the same site :p

<comment><AUTHOR> You can compensate for it a bit by reading the X-Forwarded-For header. In case someone sits behind a proxy, they usually set this header with the actual IP address of the client. You can see this here: [https://github.com/emvi/pirsch/blob/master/fingerprint.go#L2...](https://github.com/emvi/pirsch/blob/master/fingerprint.go#L29)

<comment><USER6> Behind a proxy that is (optionally) configured to share this - yes. But what of a NAT[1] gateway.. most home (and many business) networks NAT your connection - to the destination server, all devices in that network have the same IP (or the IP is seemingly very dynamic if measuring _hash(agent+ip)_ ). Other than a server or a mobile-device on network data (assuming they aren't using IPv6) an IP will almost always represent a cluster of devices.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Hard to tell how often that happens. The User-Agent should help a lot with that. I will collect more data and try to figure out how well it really works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That was a good read. And your dark mode felt like a massage for my eyes

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I use concrete [1] for styling that does take care of it. My favorite micro CSS framework :)

[1] [https://concrete.style/](https://concrete.style/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hackers! I built a server-side tracking lib in Go, please let me know what you think.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm already seeing a lot of of bot traffic via HN and started a list here: [https://github.com/emvi/pirsch/issues/1](https://github.com/emvi/pirsch/issues/1) Feel free to add more!

<comment><USER8> Perhaps you want to look at the isbot npm package. They already have a good list.

[https://github.com/gorangajic/isbot/blob/master/list.json](https://github.com/gorangajic/isbot/blob/master/list.json)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vertex-four Note: if your fingerprint can be used to identify a specific person in combination with other data (it can be), you're still subject to GDPR on this (assuming you're within jurisdiction). It's probably entirely reasonable that, given the salt that gets regenerated each midnight (and which is stored separately from the dataset), and the lack of further processing done on the dataset to match it with specific people, this is a legitimate interest, but you'll still have to mention it in your privacy policy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you explain how a person can be identified by the fingerprints I'm generating? I know it's possible to track the page flow of individual visitors, but as Pirsch does not store the IP or any information that is unique to someone, I don't know how I could trace that back to a person.

<comment> vertex-four If you have the IP and user agent in some other system (for example, if the user hits your website again, or if they make an access request where you could verify this data), you _could_ take the salt out of Pirsch and combine the three to regenerate your fingerprint, thus tying the hit data to the user. The fact that the salt exists entirely in-memory within a defined system (unless it were, for example, within an HSM which would be extremely difficult to get the salt out from) would seem to be irrelevant to the definition of personal data within the GDPR - although I'd be interested to see discussion of that. The data stops being personal data once you drop the salt entirely.

I'm also fairly certain that a trace of a single user from A through B (e.g. they hit the "payment confirmed" page at a specific time, having hit a specific product page before) could be correlated with a user in a purchases/shipping database and from there to a name and address, depending on the overall system Pirsch gets used in. Bringing separate datasets into the same tooling to query them isn't particularly hard. If it's used on a simple blog with no other tracking or systems that store this data, this argument probably doesn't hold water.

Pseudonymising data at the earliest possible point fulfils another part of the GDPR (to do with controls and protection of personal data), but doesn't in itself make something not personal data, according to the UK's ICO.

Recital 26 of the GDPR states - "To determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used, such as singling out, either by the controller or by another person to identify the natural person directly or indirectly. To ascertain whether means are reasonably likely to be used to identify the natural person, account should be taken of all objective factors, such as the costs of and the amount of time required for identification, taking into consideration the available technology at the time of the processing and technological developments."

But the fact of the matter is that there is so little risk here that it's likely to be a legitimate interest for the vast majority of businesses, thus not requiring consent (but still requiring adherance to the rest of the GDPR on personal data), again according to the ICO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the explanation. I guess I should add a secret to the generated hash. That would prevent anyone without access to it to regenerate a similar hash.

As you said it's still a good idea to inform the visitors about the anonymous tracking. I'm pretty sure that most websites require a cookie note anyway, no matter how annoying it might be.

<comment> vertex-four Most websites probably don't actually need a cookie notice, at least up-front - cookies that are "strictly required" for the website to function and are not used for non-required functionality are exempt, something that most people miss because the vast amount of discussion around this is around user-tracking advertising.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AIMA 3rd edition (Russell, Norvig) available for pre-order now - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approach-3rd/dp/0136042597/

<comment><USER2> A revised web site should be up shortly, detailing what's new. Here's what the preface says:

This edition captures the changes in AI that have taken place since the last edition in 2003. There have been important applications of AI technology, such as the widespread deployment of practical speech recognition, machine translation, autonomous vehicles, and household robotics. There have been algorithmic landmarks, such as the solution of the game of checkers. And there has been a great deal of theoretical progress, particularly in areas such as probabilistic reasoning, machine learning, and computer vision. Most important from our point of view is the continued evolution in how we think about the field, and thus how we organize the book. The major changes are as follows: \begin{itemize} \item We place more emphasis on partially observable and nondeterministic environments, especially in the nonprobabilistic settings of search and planning. The concepts of {\em belief state} (a set of possible worlds) and {\em state estimation} (maintaining the belief state) are introduced in these settings; later in the book, we add probabilities. \item In addition to discussing the types of environments and types of agents, we now cover in more depth the types of {\em representations} that an agent can use. We distinguish among {\em atomic} representations (in which each state of the world is treated as a black box), {\em factored} representations (in which a state is a set of attribute/value pairs), and {\em structured} representations (in which the world consists of objects and relations between them). \item Our coverage of planning goes into more depth on contingent planning in partially observable environments and includes a new approach to hierarchical planning. \item We have added new material on first-order probabilistic models, including {\em open-universe} models for cases where there is uncertainty as to what objects exist. \item We have completely rewritten the introductory machine-learning chapter, stressing a wider varie\ ty of more modern learning algorithms and placing them on a firmer theoretical footing. \item We have expanded coverage of Web search and information extraction, and of techniques for learning from very large data sets. \item 20\% of the citations in this edition are to works published after 2003\. \item We estimate that about 20\% of the material is brand new. The remaining 80\% reflects older work but has been largely rewritten to present a more unified picture of the field. \end{itemize}

<comment><USER3> To ask a somewhat nuanced question, what do you feel the modern relevance of Lisp and Prolog are in AI? After writing a great deal about both language families, your first "go-to" language these days seems to be Python. Have major features for exploratory programming historically associated with Lisp been incorporated into dynamic/scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, and Lua?

<comment><USER2> I think that when I was in grad school, Lisp was unique in the power it brought for the type of exploratory programming that was necessary for AI. I think that today Lisp is still a great choice, but there are other choices that are also good---as you say, other languages have incorporated many (but not all) of the good parts of Lisp, so that today the choice of language can be made based on other factors.: for example, what language do you already know, do your friends know, etc.

There is a lot of content in an AI course, and I didn't think it made sense for an instructor to take a week or two out of the semester to teach Lisp, so we added Java and Python support. Java because it is widely-known, and Python because it is fairly widely-known and because, of all the languages I know, it happens to be closest to the pseudocode we invented in the book.

I never programmed at a serious level in Prolog, so I'll let other people comment on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah very nice, the chess position shown on the cover appears to be the final position from game 6 of the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/0136042597/ref=dp_im...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/0136042597/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_%E2%80%93_Kasparov,_1...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_%E2%80%93_Kasparov,_1997,_Game_6)

</comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is looking for a good reference to one of AI's subtopics--Machine Learning--then I highly recommend Christopher Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.

I believe the book was published in 2006, so a vast majority of the material is cutting edge. It's a difficult read, and not really meant for the duct tape programmer. But if you have the patience to stick with this book for as long as I have (an entire year), then you'll be well positioned to tackle any problem in Artificial Intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER6> does anyone know what are the differences from the 2nd edition?

</comment><comment><USER7> Will it be available and optimized for the Kindle DX?

</comment><comment><USER8> Well, it's a good thing I didn't spend $100 on the 2nd edition last month at the book store.

<comment><USER9> The 3rd Ed. was announced, IIRC, over a year ago, and sample chapters have been released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any plans on an e-book of some format (pdf, mobi, azw) or otherwise?</comment>


Unsubscribe anyone from Streak's mailing list - <AUTHOR>

http://www.streak.com/email@example.com&source=SnoozeAndSplitEmailSpec<p>Change the email parameter and you are unsubscribed. No authentication!<p>@Streak team - are you listening? <comment><USER2> This is not a good fit for Show HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> alright :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the heads up, we're on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is that Aleem Mawani?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you trademark your brand / app name / business? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious if it's common or recommended for a web app to trademark their name early on.  It would cost $2000 (+$1000 to respond to complaints) to file, if that helps.<p>Does anyone have any experience or recommendations ? <comment><USER2> I just went through the trademark process with my business. If you use the abbreviated form the filing fee is $275. [http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2009january01_...](http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2009january01_2009jan12.htm#tm)

Costs beyond that are lawyer's time for doing a trademark search and filing the paperwork. I used a lawyer (and ended up spending about $1,200 including filing fees), but you can also file it yourself if money is tight.

I think it's definitely worthwhile. The odds of having to make use of your trademark are low, but having the trademark is extremely valuable if someone comes out with a similar product or service with a similar name.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just slap a tm on it and be done with it.

Once your business becomes mega profitable where the cost is peanuts...THEN you can go and get it registered.

<comment><USER4> The law actually states that you own trademark once you use it. You can put TM anytime (better when you've filed), but once you receive it, you can use the (R).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the USA, you can use (TM) without any filing as long as no one else has a claim to your mark. You need to pay and do the filing process for a _Registered_ Trademark, which carries a bit extra weight and allows you to use (R). (TM) is probably fine, and in my opinion - more recognizable. The (R) is good if you're a bit smaller and competitors might consider for gunning for you/misrepresenting.

For instance, Salesforce.com has the (R) going on: <http://salesforce.com>

Gmail is doing the (TM): <http://mail.google.com>

My rough intuition is that the bigger you are, the better slapping (TM) on works, even if you're registered. Both (R) and (TM) add credibility, but I think the (R) works better as deterrent to somewhat savvy competitors, whereas the (TM) might be more recognized by consumers. Most people know that TM is trademark, and don't know what (R) means.

<comment><USER6> In the US, in order to recover the full spectrum of damages caused by the infringement of a federally registered trademark, the infringer has to be on "notice" that the mark is registered. The "tm" symbol is NOT sufficient notice and should not be used to designate that the trademark is registered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You absolutely need to do this.

If cost is an issue - you can file a single application in a couple of classes in your local country, then broaden it out when funds allow until you cover the main countries you plan to operate.

At the company I work for at the moment, we filed globally from very early on (probably cost £100k or something and takes a year or so), but every time we have an issue with a fraudulent domain name registration or something, we can recover it in days.

Plus you can capitalise this as an asset, it's not an expense, so there are no downsides to it.

I can recommend a specialist firm like Williams Powell (<http://www.williamspowell.com>) in the UK.

<comment><USER8> mtkd,

Have you needed to recover a squatted domain? Have you had success with it, due to your TM? (Although I've never been in the situation,) I've heard it's tough to recover in either situation -- was your experience better b/c of the TM?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I filed our name myself for the bare minimum filing fee ($275 now). I think it's useful to put your stake in the ground and it increases the liability for those who violate your trademark. I went the cheap route because I felt if I could get it approved by the USPTO myself, it's a done deal. In the case of patents, how you formulate the claims has a major impact on how defendable your patent will be -- so pays to get some expert eyes.

</comment><comment><USER10> I work as an IP paralegal by day (when not fiendishly working on my own coding projects at night).

My one recommendation is that if you are cost conscious, send your IP projects (copyright, patent, trademark) to a boutique or, as we call them, a 'mill'. Having worked in both boutique and large conglomerate firm settings, I can attest to the fact boutiques are far more organized and, because their overhead is so much less, far less expensive.

W/r/t at what point in your development cycle you should register the TM, I have seen the spectrum of very early to very late filings. While in one instance a late-stage filing resulted in more similar marks out there (and the class claims for goods/ services had to be much more limited) I have not yet seen it be detrimental to getting registered eventually.

On the other hand, small start-ups (both net based and brick-and-mortar) account for a disproporionate number of the applications we have to let go abandoned due to client request or nonpayment.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you're a sole developer or small team of friends, don't bother until money is rolling in. First priority (over lawyers, accountants and whatever else) is just getting something up and running. Invest too hard early and if you abandon the project, you've wasted more than necessary.

</comment><comment><USER12> What's in a name?</comment>


Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal police shootings - <AUTHOR> https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877 <comment><USER2> Note the correction to this paper at [https://www.pnas.org/content/117/16/9127](https://www.pnas.org/content/117/16/9127)</comment>


How are you archiving your data for 20+ years? SURVEY - <AUTHOR> http://stheory.wufoo.com/forms/survey-data-storage-strategies/

<comment><AUTHOR> Remember Paul Stamatiou's post about storage for photographer's [[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6020969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6020969)]? Well, we have been thinking about this for a while now and are looking for some feedback.</comment>


The Self-Employed Are the Happiest - <AUTHOR> http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/the-self-employed-are-the-happiest/ <comment><USER2> For me to get rich is not an important aspect of life: All I need is to be able to get decent food, have a simple but comfortable house, be able to travel two or three times every year. This is why the reason I start companies is exactly to free myself from a condition where I'm required to go to work at 8 a.m. with a boss that tells me what to do (possibly not right or interesting for me), and with at max 30 days of holidays in the year, without the ability to do, for instance, much more today, and get a free day tomorrow. This is in my opinion the highest value of creating a startup.

It's worth to note that if you are like me high risk startups with VCs in the middle may not be the best idea, but something that is able to be supported by a decent business model ASAP is better.

</comment><comment><USER3> This post triggers one of my major statistics peeves:

A rank order list without variance is meaningless. The differences between the categories are very small. They are most likely not statistically significant.

<comment><USER4> Furthermore, it seems to imply that being a business owner makes you happy. It could just as well be that people who often take control of their lives and actively pursue what makes them happy, which perhaps has a huge influence on their natural happiness, are more likely to become business owners.

<comment><USER5> My experience is that business owners (of necessity when dealing with lenders, customers and their own doubts and fears) have trained themselves to tell white lies. They'll say to everyone "Yeah things are going great, business is booming, I couldn't be happier!" when actually they are totally stressed out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 I want to cheer the headline, but how useful is this data when so many wildly different professions are lumped into the #2 occupation?

 _Professional worker--lawyer, doctor, scientist, teacher, engineer, nurse, accountant, computer programmer, architect, investment banker, stock brokerage, marketing, musician, artist_

Is it really of any value to anyone to lump the "Overall well-being" of an artist, computer programmer, and investment banker into the same category?

</comment><comment><USER6> Alternate headline: It's good to be king.

</comment><comment><USER7> It´s just a survey, but one thing we can conclude by the data: those who earn more, "think" they are more happy. And those who earn less, "think" they are less happy.

The point is, what is happiness ? By these numbers, happiness comes from money and by my personal experience (could be wrong), happiness don´t have anything with money. Maybe joy, satisfaction and fun have, but not true happiness. So the article could be entitled as: The Self-Employed Are The Most Satisfied ... and not the happiest. Maybe the most happiest are priests, nuns and people who dedicate their lives to others. Guess the survey was ok, but the journalist behind the article was not happy in the way that he interpreted the research.

<comment><USER8> I'm confused by your quotation marks around 'think'. Are you suggesting that, in the case of a personal emotional state, people _don't_ know whether they themselves are happy or not? It reminds me of a joke in L.A. STORY (paraphrased): "Which is to say: I was deeply unhappy but didn't know it, because I was so happy all the time".

Generally, studies involving happiness sidestep the minefield of trying to quantify or even qualify happiness. They simply ask people whether they are happy and then search for statistical correlations between those who report being 'happy' vs those who report being 'sad'.

I can only imagine that this study was conducted similarly.

<comment><USER7>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I usually really like the New York Times, but this is just raw data. There's no exposition.

<comment><USER10> Better than an exposition with no raw data at least.

<comment><USER9> True, but the other comments here expose why exposition is needed. There's a lot of ways this data could just be discarded. If it's truly meaningful, the author needs to explain why.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Flashfed.com – a flash sale aggregator powered by machine learning - <AUTHOR> https://flashfed.com/?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I was hoping to get some feedback for my MVP.

I'm currently using a least-squares linear regression model trained with n-gram (unigrams) feature hashing, based on various social media metrics, with a heavy weight on sharing. It spits out a number between 1-50, with 25 being the most common.

Pretty much everything is automated with Huginn[0]: web scraping, data formatting, interaction with Azure ML[1], all of which is fed into a wordpress install using the pluginhunt[2] theme.

Let me know what you think!

[0]: [https://github.com/huginn/huginn](https://github.com/huginn/huginn) [1]: [https://studio.azureml.net/](https://studio.azureml.net/) [2]: [https://epicthemes.com/product/plugin-hunt- theme/](https://epicthemes.com/product/plugin-hunt-theme/)</comment>


New React DevTools - <AUTHOR> https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/08/15/new-react-devtools.html <comment><USER2> React DevTools are very valuable.

But only because React, with transpiling and the shadow DOM and all that is so inscrutable.

There's no hope of understanding the DOM with React, no hope of understanding styles with styled-components. There's no hope of placing a breakpoint in your code and tracing forward through events. No hope of understanding stack traces.

The DevTools begin to address some of those deficiencies. It does help, but still leaves me thinking the tradeoffs weren't worth it. You can never reach simplicity, only manageable complexity. In the long run it leaves an opportunity for a new generation of tools that respect JavaScript and the DOM.

<comment><USER3> What's wrong with the in-browser DOM inspector? I've never run into a problem with React, it's output, it's error messages, or anything else such that I couldn't trivially dive in and fix. I've never once felt the need for React DevTools in my 5 or so years of React.

I remember AngularJS well, that's a framework I can do without.

<comment><USER4> Inspecting the state or properties of components. Inspecting the component hierarchy (not always possible to guess it from the DOM). Things like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brian has done some _fantastic_ work improving the DevTools! This is going to benefit the whole React community for years to come.

Be sure to check out the complete changelog and the tutorial linked in the announcement.

<comment><USER6> Yes he has put in great efforts for building this awesome tool

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I like about having React DevTools installed is you can easily see which sites use React because the little icon lights up. It's a surprising amount these days; React is getting so popular.

<comment><USER8> From my PoV, React is already past its maximum in the hype cycle, and I see customers choosing vue.js most of the time. I have no stake in this (haven't worked with vue.js, nor with new React with hooks etc.), but presumably vue.js is chosen for React-like MVw without the jsx/babel+webpack build step drama, as a simple js lib.

<comment><USER9> This sounds like a misunderstanding to me. "JSX/Babel/webpack" aren't any more required for React than for Vue. Here's how to use React without them: [https://reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a- website.html](https://reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a-website.html)

Just drop it as a script on the page.

Ironically, my understanding is that it's Vue that requires a compiler for even basic component support. If you don't use webpack or similar tools with Vue, as far as I know, you can't declare an idiomatic reusable Vue component.

With React, whether you use Babel/JSX/Webpack or not, components are always available. They're the whole point.

I think it's fair to say that Vue is initially more familiar to and easier to get started with for folks who are more comfortable with HTML. React is more JS-centric. Even though in the end they render the same DOM elements.

<comment><USER8> Hm, then it's indeed a misunderstanding on my side. I definitely need to take a look into vue, but I thought people were choosing it over React because they didn't like JSX but would prefer straight HTML (though again, I don't know vue and how it would be possible for vue to render components based on just HTML syntax).

<comment><USER9> Vue offers a more gradual learning curve coming from HTML. Because in the beginning, you don't write components in JS at all. Instead, you can use Vue "directives" like `v-if` right _inside_ your HTML. Later, when you're ready for components, you have to add a compiler.

React takes a different approach. It doesn't "pretend" to be HTML by extending it with custom directives. Instead, it forces you to start the journey in JS land. That can be frustrating at first if you're unfamiliar with JS. But the gap between "simple" and "complex" is smaller: you learn the idea of components once, and can apply it with or without a toolchain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As if the improvements of the dev tools weren't enough, they've created a sweet interactive tutorial ([https://react-devtools- tutorial.now.sh](https://react-devtools-tutorial.now.sh))! Don't know it it's new, but I'am very impressed.

<comment><USER11> Where they=brianvaughn (I see he's also left a comment elsewhere on this post), who did most of the work on both the tutorial and the dev tools.

<comment><USER12> Glad the tutorial is helpful! :)

It was a last minute idea and I'm excited about how it turned out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ooooh exciting.

I was impressed to see how well hooks worked when attaching Vscode to a chrome instance in debug mode. They just show up in the list of closures at your breakpoint. Maybe I need to try harder but I haven't been needing react dev tools.

<comment><USER12> You might still check out DevTools at some point :) They do a lot of small things that can be nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anybody bother to go through this codebase? It's a great tool, but Facebook is the last company I'd want to have the obscene privileges that extensions have.

<comment><USER9> If you saw the scary permission dialog upgrading, that was due to our mistake: [https://twitter.com/reactjs/status/1162174507391574017](https://twitter.com/reactjs/status/1162174507391574017).

Commits with fixes:

* [https://github.com/bvaughn/react-devtools-experimental/commi...](https://github.com/bvaughn/react-devtools-experimental/commit/545de6f02e7d8905ba4e1cd358e68bb640a31a0a)

* [https://github.com/bvaughn/react-devtools-experimental/commi...](https://github.com/bvaughn/react-devtools-experimental/commit/527fc4a63f497db1f370a8312807c2a68147edec)

 __Both of these issues should be fixed in 4.0.2. __

Brian goes into more detail on why we originally added these permissions during the rewrite, and why we were able to remove them:[https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/cqx554/introducing...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/cqx554/introducing_the_new_react_devtools/ex0p0m1/). (TLDR: some were for features we ended up cutting; others had easier workarounds that didn't need these permissions.)

The source code is here ([https://github.com/bvaughn/react-devtools- experimental/commi...](https://github.com/bvaughn/react-devtools- experimental/commits/source)). We're currently moving it into React repo so it's easier to find ([https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/16381](https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/16381)) but haven't managed to make the CI green so the source of truth for releases is still in that branch. We plan to cut over to React repo as source of truth next week.

<comment><USER14> Yes, thanks for addressing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Only had a cursory glance at the new tools but looks awesome. Love the new look and feel and the hooks inspector is working flawlessly. kudos folks!!

</comment><comment><USER16> Hooks still show up without variable names associated with them (I say still because I was using this before release). I assumed they would try to find a way around it. In the current state the hooks support is useless.

</comment><comment><USER17> Congrats on the release Brian!

</comment><comment><USER18> 1.7 million users in Chrome? Wow, that's a lot of React developers.

<comment><USER12> It's a little scary to upload a completely new version, when you know there's that many weekly active users that are going to be hammering away on it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >It also offers full support for React Hooks, including inspecting nested objects.

Thank goodness, that was killing me.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anybody else get "Unable to find React on the page" error in private mode in Firefox?

</comment><comment><USER21> Great news. Excited to try it out. Thanks a lot.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this the same program that, if a project has installed, tries to make a bunch of websocket requests from the app to the browser plugin, which if non- existent causes your console and network tab to be flooded with failed websocket requests?

<comment><USER23> I'm surprised that everyone's looking confused here. Yes: since 2016 (React Native v0.32), at least on iOS, React Native apps in development mode try to open WebSocket connections to standalone React DevTools at startup and indeed flood your console with cryptic messages.

[https://github.com/facebook/react- native/issues/10027](https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/10027)

The issue has been locked and is still open.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for explaining. This is the first time I'm hearing about this issue. I'll pass it to the team so it can get fixed.

<comment><USER23> Thanks, Dan! The incessant console-flooding was actually one of the things that made me give up on React Native. Great to hear that this is being addressed.

<comment><USER9> >The incessant console-flooding was actually one of the things that made me give up on React Native.

Doesn't this particular issue include a workaround?

<comment><USER22> > But unfortunate it's not enough. Especially because other websocket created > in RCTPackagerConnection (funcition socketForLocation) and as I can see it > can't be disabled from AppDelegate :-(</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why can't browsers just be used for browsing (Chromium upgrade in OBS) - <AUTHOR> https://obsproject.com/blog/progress-report-september-2019 <comment><USER2> Browsers are a case of monolithism (and the inner-platform effect, of course).

In actuality, they are multiple different kinds of programs, welded together for no sensible reason.

* A http fetching daemon. * A "runner" to open URLs. * Several document viewers. * A virtual machine. * An OS with an API. * Extensive libraries for everything that the OS below the OS already offered. * One or several programming language JIT compiler(s) and runtime(s). * And some bits and pieces.

In a healthy environment, there would not be a second OS on top of the normal one. And all those parts would be separate software, with standardized interfaces. Doing one thing and doing it right. (Most of which already exist in the OS, and don't have to be reinvented. Case in point: WebSockets. Or, worse even, DNS over HTTP.)

That is what we should work towards.

Not that Google would ever not fight that, tooth and nail.

<comment><USER3> The other huge factor is that developers love re-inventing stuff. Nobody wants to be content just maintaining something that has been working for 30 years, because thats career suicide in today's world. "Hey, tell me about the cool stuff you're working on.." "You guys are still using that framework? Wow!". Its an interesting contrast from the industry I'm in (vaccines) where people are extremely risk-averse and do not ever want to disturb code/process flows that work and are making money. I have come to appreciate software reliability a LOT more.

Also.. given the massive surface area of new untested code thats being constantly pumped out, visiting a website today, is absolutely no different than downloading a random binary from the internet and running it. The ".com" address might as well be an actual .COM file that is downloaded and executed...

<comment><USER2> No, I must cometely disagree there.

We certainly love improving stuff. But more than half the point of programming is, that you only have to come up with and do it once. We just copy the code, and add our improvement.

And open source developers aren't interested in a "career", but in making a good program.

Frameworks are another pathological case of monolithism by the way. Use libraries. That can be combined however you want. Under your rule. Not frameworks. That accept no other framework beside them. Under their rule.

I completely agree on the second paragraph though. VMs are not a security solution. The OS has to do its job.</comment></comment></comment>