Firefox removes RSS support - <AUTHOR> https://evertpot.com/firefox-rss/ <comment><USER2> The removal was previously discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17617821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17617821)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am super disappointed, Mozilla! This is such a slippery slope you've created here. If FF doesn't support RSS anymore then even fewer people will use RSS and RSS will die rather sooner than later. This is such a pity as RSS can really empower users.

You basically infringe your own mission statement:

> Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and > accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where > individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and > independent.

<comment><USER4> Despite RSS' cult status among Hacker News readers, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that RSS is already dead. It's been dead. I would even go so far as to say it was dead on arrival, because the average user was never able to make any sense of it.

<comment><USER5> I am developing a little site which is a news aggregator and search engine for a certain niche topic. Out of a couple hundred sources, I'd say more than 95% support RSS, basically anything that uses wordpress or any blog or CMS system. I was really surprized how widespread it still is, and it makes my life a whole lot easier, since I don't have to scrape all those sites.

Maybe the model of subscribing to all your favorite blogs with a news reader didn't catch on, but RSS is still used a lot behind the scenes for other purposes.

<comment><USER6> You just wrote it is a little site for a niche topic. What you call widespread is not nearly as widespread as you think it is.

<comment><USER7> @captainmuon ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683845)) didn't say it was widespread in any absolute sense, only that he or she was surprised by _how_ widespread it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I will go against the grain here and say that this is good. RSS is not a core function of a web browser and as such should be handled by an extension, if at all.

<comment><USER9> I think browsers should render any content type in a way that provides functionality for a user; for example, I think it would be great if when loading a JSON file, I could toggle between the raw data provided and a pretty-printed, syntax-highlighted, collapsable tree view of the JSON file. I think it would be great if when loading an MD file, I could toggle between the raw markdown and a rendered version. Certainly when I load an image or audio file outside a webpage, my browser decodes renders the content usefully.

Given these cases, why would XML files be any different?

<comment><USER10> yes to all this, but then when do you stop? how many file types should be supported by a browser? i'm sure some people would like it that the browser could edit spreadsheets too. there are so many different use cases.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. At a certain point you find that you've made more than a browser, you've made a full OS

<comment><USER12> If you have a security model and a virtual machine, you already _have_ , haven't you? Browsers are in a meaningful way _already_ operating systems. (This is not an original thought).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Running a profitable RSS-driven startup ([https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com)), I've come to the conclusion that RSS is not a consumer technology. It's a business technology, and a critical notification 'protocol'.

Millions of businesses, 'knowledge workers' and infovores rely on RSS for their daily workflow and learning, without which they'll have no other reasonable alternative to stay updated with decisive information and insights for high-volume, high-frequency, low-noise Web content.

Starting from Google Reader's shutdown to Firefox's removal of RSS support, it's just that these consumer vendors have not been able to leverage its business use-cases. It's a feature for them that they couldn't monitize, because that requires a different tool-set, which is not their primary product.

RSS is a backbone, much like a simple API, but it was touted as a front-end enriched with ads, analytics, widgets etc., that didn't/can't work for the casual consumer.

RSS ecosystem is alive and healthy for it's vast and core audience, irrespective.

<comment><USER14> Uh, this post sounds like an ad. The pricing model of that service obviously targets businesses instead of consumers, so it's kind of obvious from where the demand would come.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not cool. This also seems to imply no support for Atom feeds as well. I have switched my media channels entirely to RSS/Atom feeds, though I only read them through Emacs. This cannot stop stuff like fake news, but it always seemed important to me to the fact that it makes viewing discussions entirely optional (you have to visit the link for that). The lack of ads is also a plus.

<comment><USER16> You know, I feel like a moron now.

I have come to use emacs for everything, and I love being in emacs. It never occurred to me that I don't have to find an RSS reader -- just an emacs package.

Thank you for writing this comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> People who don't use RSS say it's dead, and they won't be convinced otherwise.

People who use it every day know that it's not dead at all.

Firefox's decision will not make the slightest bit of difference for either group of people.

<comment><USER18> It is all about how you define 'dead'. Some people mean 'dead' as in 'not one single person is still using it' and others mean 'dead' as in 'it is declining in popularity and is no longer mainstream'

RSS is dead for the latter people but not the former.

<comment><USER19> Another definition of 'dead' is "I don't use it, and no one I know uses it (or if they do I don't hear about it)"

<comment><USER20> Agreed.

I used RSS 10 years ago. Even bought a keyboard with a LCD to have my RSS headlines always available.

I have no need for that functionality for years.

I know noone in person who uses RSS anymore.

I would call it dead (but obviously as per other comments here, people still need/use them).

<comment><USER19> > Even bought a keyboard with a LCD to have my RSS headlines always available

Woah, what keyboard was this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Firefox' handling of RSS feeds as live bookmarks was one of its killer features back in the day, at least to me. But it must have hit a nerve with others, too, because I remember that Microsoft put something RSS-related into IE7; I never used IE7, though, so I cannot vouch for that.

Of course, there are alternatives, but still - the live bookmarks are _really_ cool and extremely convenient to use. It's a shame they are going to be excised. At least that gives me an incentive to pick up the RSS aggregator I wrote a couple of years back and polish it a little.

<comment><USER22> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/livemarks/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/livemarks/)

<comment><USER21> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> First, a shout-out for inoreader.com :)

Really disappointed in Mozilla. After all, it's quite obvious, if you don't modernize and even continue to hide a feature for years, its usage won't improve unless external events drive the demand.

And since RSS readers counter the interests of both ad- and subscription- driven media, it's unlikely there will be any demand generated by anyone else other than RSS aggregators themselves.

<comment><USER23> It used to be a way for media to keep their readers updated about new content, which was in line with the interests of both subscription and ad driven media. But since then we've come to have Twitter, Facebook, mobile apps with notifications, even websites with notifications, so RSS has become somewhat redundant.

<comment><USER14> Uh, what have notifications anything to do with RSS? Practically all all web services and mobile apps for it offer them.

Social media, on the other hand, is an alternative solution to the consumption of information, not inherently a better form of aggregation.

It is mainly the addiction to social feedback that attracts people to social media, while RSS is a boring stream of data you've specifically decided to process.

<comment><USER23> RSS was created in 1999, when short of visiting a website it was the only way to get updates about new content. Now, there are other ways which people already use and like, addiction or not.

<comment><USER14> When RSS was created is irrelevant, when its age does not hinder innovation in its implementations. It's like saying email or phone calls are obsolete because social media has taken over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's a pity, live bookmarks are useful for things other than blogs, for example bugzilla queries. I hope the Web Extensions API is enough to provide something similar.

<comment><USER25> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/livemarks/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/livemarks/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not sure we're losing that much, there are many good RSS readers that provide way more features than Firefox does. Off the top of my head: [https://feedly.com](https://feedly.com), [https://inoreader.com](https://inoreader.com), and my own [https://aktu.io](https://aktu.io) (with a nice dark theme [https://aktu.io?theme=dark](https://aktu.io?theme=dark) :-))

<comment><USER27> I'm not familiar with your reader, so I don't want anyone to take this as a comment on what you've made — but I know that the first two are both monetized, though they don't tell what you'll have to pay up-front. A third- party for-profit business with sketchy monetization practices doesn't seem like a better replacement for RSS integrated in Firefox.

<comment><USER28> Agreed. I just tried to find a feed reader for my phone and those two creeped me out for sure. No way I'd give them my email address.

Why do you need my address in order for me to view RSS feeds from somebody else?

<comment><USER29> May want to check out SparseRSS.

[https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.shandschuh.sparserss/](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.shandschuh.sparserss/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> To bad. I found this really useful and would often use Firefox to look at RSS of podcasts.

Sadly many pages don't have a good page to browse threw or search podcast. In the RSS page you could do a page search and find all the relevant info.

However there are probably other ways to achieve the same thing, so I'm not really all that opposed.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is sad. Atom is going to be one of those standards that gets uptake eventually, and Mozilla is already positioned well. It cost them nothing to keep it other than the additional maintenance complexity, while removing it upsets the admittedly small at present userbase that use the features alot (like myself). I use Live bookmarks for server status updates, commits, and a number of other things in addition to blogs.

That is easier for me than having Growl on my Mac, DBus notifications on Linux, or Windows Push Notification Service on Windows. Instead I can use one protocol, and the same app I've already installed, on each of those platforms.

<comment><USER32> > It cost them nothing to keep it other than the additional maintenance > complexity, while removing it upsets the admittedly small at present > userbase that use the features alot (like myself).

Sounds like they're being pragmatic then by removing a not so popular feature that has the potential of adding maintenance complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Not the best move from Firefox. But, they never did support RSS more than half-heartedly.

OTOH, the constantly-maintained-these-days Thunderbird supports RSS -just fine-.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thats really too bad. I use RSS heavily with internal tools to give me sorted lists of config changes, trouble tickets, alarms, caller logs, emails/voicemail, etc.

I also have a nicely curated set of RSS searches from Nyaatorrents, craigslist, Kijiji and a few other sites that I check thru firefox.

</comment><comment><USER35> As the creator of the infamous Popurls, I can assure you that RSS is anything but dead since I launched a successor at hvper.com a while ago and the site is alive and kicking. Obviously a lot more is coming from APIs these days but no major site has removed support for it.

<comment><USER36> [EDIT:] Suggested correction...

<comment><USER35> Thanks, Corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> installed firefox recently and it's showing me recommended content from Pocket.

bro not cool. I don't want your backend recommendation engine tracking what I'm doing.

(online or off)

(and, yes, I disabled it, as well rewired the pocket-relevant urls to example.com)

<comment><USER38> "Important Note: Neither Mozilla nor Pocket receives a copy of your browser history. The entire process of sorting and filtering which stories you should see happens locally in your copy of Firefox. " [https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab- reco...](https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab- recommendations)

<comment><USER37> That only _marginally_ makes it better...

<comment><USER39> Digging in your heels when your central point is refuted is not a great strategy, and your reply seems to indicate that you're prepared to move the goalposts.

<comment><USER37> I don't want an analysis of my browsing habits by anyone _not me_ , fundamentally. I don't want "popular sites" sent to my machine, I don't want my habits sent upstream. Either is not my desire.

I really don't feel like having the debate as to whether its local or remote - both are quite compromiseable in terms of security.

I don't want to have this integration into my browser. I don't like Green Eggs and Ham, Sam I am. _I do not want it this way or that, online or off_. That is the goalpost I expect Mozilla to hit, based on their general vision.

If I want to have my browsing habits analyzed, I'd rather `cat` out the history file to a tool I wrote.

Mozilla being an entity historically predicated on better practices choosing to deal this way is highly unpleasant. And, on topic, RSS is a good open practice that should be kept. Mozilla's choice to axe RSS and keep Pocket seems to all be in the same vein.

<comment><USER40> > _I really don 't feel like having the debate as to whether its local or > remote - both are quite compromiseable in terms of security._

The moment that thing is local your concerns are not valid anymore. If a local browsing habits file can be exploited your browsing habits could also be detected by other means. Like you yourself said, that is just included in your browsing history (stored anyway by default).

There is no point in expressing a dislike for a good solution when the thing they are doing does not at all conflict with their mission. Which is the thing with removing RSS support, but not with the site recommendation.

If your main concern - not wanting that your history is uploaded - is met by the great solution Mozilla seems to have found here, it would really be the right thing to accept that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I would shamelessly suggest to try my web based reader - [https://bazqux.com](https://bazqux.com) \- simple business model, no ads/tracking, just read your feeds effectively.

But in general that's bad. Having feeds support in a browser is a good way to get more people to know about RSS. And the more people know about RSS the better for humanity.

People must know that there are another ways to get content than liking something in a silo. And more importantly - the medium is the message - content that you get in RSS feeds is different from social media. It's not oriented to be likeable or shareable or to make money in any way. It's more about ideas, opinions and utilitarian (not emotional) news. Yes, you could still get junk in RSS feed, but there are much less chances to get it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Yet another reason not to upgrade to Quantum+ I guess. Currently I've got ~30 RSS/Atom feeds in my toolbar.

Does anyone have Pocket usage numbers to measure its popularity? Web Dev tools? The Firefox Tour? Since we're already discussing stripping out features based on such a corporate metric...

</comment><comment><USER43> Firefox has been removing stuff for a while... the slippery slope has started at the point when the extension compat checking became a version-based setting that you need to re-set after every update. It was downhill from there... what used to be a hyper customizable browser with lots of features and extensibility, is now just inferior, open-source Chrome wannabe.

I've personally stopped using it a few months ago after being a fan since before it was called Firefox (Mozilla browser? or something). The only things I miss are minor stuff like being able to color tabs (who knows, Firefox might have disabled that too since then).

<comment><USER44> Chrome doesn't have per-tab accounts/"containers", built-in tracking protection, a screenshot tool, built-in or even first-party dark theme, an API to let extensions hide tabs, or the (upcoming in FF63) ability to control autoplaying video on a per-site basis. And the mobile version still doesn't support extensions at all. Even if you don't _use_ these features, I don't see the argument that FF is a Chrome wannabe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> So, now for my RSS feeds I use to check for news articles to read _in my browser_ , I'll now have to install an external program/extension just to load the feed, to read these articles _in my browser_.

</comment><comment><USER46> Wow. Really fucking awful decision.

Parsing XML is such a hassle? Laughable to think Firefox is so bloated that not rendering a styled DOM for an XML datatype saves them an hour of payroll or trims hardly a megabyte off their binary.

This is probably the least amount of complexity they could drop, and yet they bloat the fuck out of their application, with features I turn off, avoid or never use.

Pocket, Web RTC, those stupid cartoon images for their error messages. And so much more, worth so much less.

<comment><USER47> Parsing RSS is a hassle. The specification never made it clear if you could include HTML or not---did you entity encode the HTML? Strip it out so it's only plain text in the feed? The original designer of RSS, Dave Winer, never clarified that point, nor did he want to. In fact, he got downright _nasty_ when a group _did_ clean up the specification and released it as RSS 2.0. That lead to the development of Atom, to clarify these issues and remove Dave Winer from the discussion.

So there are at least three different RSS standards, most of which are under specified as to what is and isn't allowed. It's like the tag soup of XML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm very disappointed, Mozilla. This move completely hinders RSS discovery and use. RSS isn't dead yet. It's actually an important technology for the free and open web. Pocket? I doubt...

</comment><comment><USER49> I've used RSS pretty heavily, but never Live Bookmarks.

Who sticks a feed of news stories in a drop-down menu?!

<comment><USER39> Live Bookmarks always seemed like a solution in search of a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Absolutely tragic.

I've been using FF RSS[0] for 16 years now, since Mozilla Firefox was Mozilla Phoenix. Never left the browser all these years, of course I tested other things out and kept native browsers (Safari/Edge) as backup browsers. But these features are what differentiate it from other browsers, there's no way there's substantial ongoing maintenance cost to RSS/Atom support at this point.

Shame on them, they know better than this. If they want to help advertisers, if they want a centralized web, if they want to remove the few reasons left for not just using Chrome, then it's a great idea.

As soon as I lose my RSS support, for the first time in 15 years (before which I was a Netscape Navigator user) I'll be looking for a new browser.

I see a lot of mentions about Foxish, I tried that with Chrome a few times, it's not very reliable. I didn't find it worked very well at all, updates erratically and so forth.

If all browsers are becoming the same, there's very little reason to not just take the performance-power savings of native browsers. So I'll likely just use Edge and Safari going forward. Browsers are the majority of what people use their computers for, so any resource savings that results in power usage reductions is welcome, especially on mobile. I'll take a good hard look at Brave as well, those folks are actually trying hard to upset the apple cart, instead of just removing features to upset someone.

[0][https://i.imgur.com/Xzv9KyS.png](https://i.imgur.com/Xzv9KyS.png)

</comment><comment><USER51> I so much hope they're not going to remove it from Thunderbird, which I'm using for consuming feeds.

<comment><USER4> RSS always made more sense to me in a mail client than a browser. Live bookmarks were useless to me.

<comment><USER52> I remember the original video introducing Google Reader. "Imagine an inbox for the web", the guy said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> bummer. I use live bookmarks extensively, it's nice to be able to see at a glance whether or not a blog or web comic has an update without visiting the site. anyone know of an extension that will provide this functionality?

<comment><USER54> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/livemarks/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/livemarks/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> If you view the source of any Feedburner RSS feed, you'll see that it's quite easy to use an XSL stylesheet with some CSS and make the actual RSS render however you like in a browser.

</comment><comment><USER56> > they represented an idea that anyone can start a website and become part of > the "blogosphere"

The main barrier to entry isn't the lack of RSS, it's the fact that people don't read as much anymore. It's gotten to the point where if you submit anything text-based (as opposed to photos, video, podcasts, etc.) to a lot of subreddits the moderators flag it as spam.

<comment><USER57> That's more to do with Reddit being horrible and horribly moderated than any concrete problem with RSS, though.

<comment><USER23> There are also subreddits with mostly text only submissions, but of course they are neither the meme or porn ones.

Actually, there are even some subreddits which act like a RSS feed for some sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> While the built-in reader isn't the most amazing thing in the world, I assume this also means the Subscribe button is being killed? I'm sure an extension will be able to do the same thing, but that's somewhat of a nuisance.

</comment><comment><USER59> If you're looking for a free alternative: [http://github.com/getstream/winds](http://github.com/getstream/winds)

</comment><comment><USER60> Ouch, I was actually using this feature. :( I hope Mozilla knows what they are doing...

</comment><comment><USER61> Userbase removes Firefox support

</comment><comment><USER62> Mozilla: killing the open web.

</comment><comment><USER63> If everyone hates what firefox/mozilla is doing why dont you guys stop writing blog posts and start making a fork of firefox/thunderbird?

<comment><USER64> Not sure why you're mad but Firefox doesn't exactly consist of 10 files.

<comment><USER63> Well I guess I should chill sorry... but if like even if some of the people stopped blogging and started either testing the alternatives or maybe wrote a few lines of code to fix the small bugs we would get somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Who needs RSS when there is pocket. /s

<comment><USER66> It's sad that Mozilla's excuse when responding to the Pocket integration was that Pocket wouldn't affect Firefox if you you use it. Now why don't they say the same for RSS? The "new tab" page is a glorified Pocket ads right now.

<comment><USER22> You can turn those off easily enough: just click the gear in the top right of the newtab page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I think if anything, this supports Mozilla's message: "... where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered..."

Well, individuals shaped their experience by not using RSS.

<comment><USER68> Well, that thing in bookmarks wasn't really that useful (if it ever was) for most of users, so I'm a bit surprised they kept support for RSS for so long. I would've not been surprised if they dropped support for it around the same time they killed e.g. Gopher-related code (Firefox 4, c. 2011).

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Classical Mozilla

</comment><comment><USER70> As long as it still renders the RSS feed in a reasonable manner and doesn't default to just an XML dump.

I guess it's not too bad.

Edit: actually it looks like they're removing the reader as well. Guess I'll have to find a extension. Shouldn't be too hard

<comment><USER22> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/livemarks/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/livemarks/)</comment></comment>


This Designer Designs with Her Nose - <AUTHOR> http://www.looknohands.me/

<comment><USER2> She could have looked into using one of those chairs with half a keyboard in the armrests. Her neck will eventually give out and then she's toast. :(

</comment><comment><USER3> Fascinating, but I'm concerned this may be bad for your neck in the long run.</comment>


Show HN: Cryptominded – A curated directory of the best cryptocurrency resources - <AUTHOR> https://cryptominded.com <comment><USER2> Hey! I saw you on PH yesterday. And today you are on the front page of HN, you are killing it. Great resource.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great resource, crypto space is so new and there's so many things popping up that something that organizes the space together is much needed. What's your stack?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Exactly why I built it. It's on wordpress, nothing fancy but it got the job done quickly.

<comment><USER2> WP can be very fancy. Depends on who is doing it ;)

<comment><USER3> I didn't think this was built on WP from first glance, so good customisation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a good work, something for a newcomer to get up to speed fast!</comment>


Is there a winning strategy in Tetris? - <AUTHOR> https://mathoverflow.net/questions/279656/is-there-winning-strategy-in-tetris-what-if-young-diagrams-are-falling <comment><USER2> True story: the Cambridge Maths Society, The Archimedeans, had a journal called Eureka (of course). It happily published interesting but not important bits of mathematics. One student wrote a proof of an impossible sequence for any width board. It's even impossible if you have perfect knowledge of the sequence. All you need is to drop Ss and Zs in an irrational order.

I think this got published in 1990, but I can find little evidence even if the journal's existence online.

<comment><USER3> I think you mean this one? Of course it's also possible that multiple people have published multiple proofs.

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2347389_How_to_Lose...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2347389_How_to_Lose_at_Tetris)

The proof itself is quite self-evident: given a perfectly randomly block generator, and infinite play time, eventually you're going to produce a very long sequence of left- (or right-) facing S-blocks. Since those are impossible to eliminate (there's always one block left open on a row) eventually you lose.

<comment><USER4> This actually isn't true for modern variants of Tetris. A correct implementation of the random number generator requires that the 7 pieces be shuffled into a bag and then drawn randomly, ensuring an even distribution, and disallowing long runs without a desired piece. (Maximum of 12.) The bag is re-shuffled every 7 blocks in the sequence.

[https://tetris.wiki/Tetris_Guideline](https://tetris.wiki/Tetris_Guideline)

[https://tetris.wiki/Random_Generator](https://tetris.wiki/Random_Generator)

Thus, in a game of Tetris adhering to these official guidelines, the longest sequential run of S and Z pieces would be 4, in the following sequence:

[5 Random Blocks] [Z and S in any order] [Z and S in any order] [5 Random Blocks]

I'd be very curious to see a proof of an impossible sequence which adheres to the official rules, as that would be quite a feat indeed!

<comment><USER3> In that case it would probably still be possible, but the proof would have to be found by example. It seems like an advanced version of the Eight Queens puzzle: which sequence of bags guarantees a losing board state?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Search for "tetris championship" on YouTube. Some great tetris gameplay and you can pick up on a lot of the strategy pros use.

Ex: [https://youtu.be/DdfRQjb5o9k](https://youtu.be/DdfRQjb5o9k)

</comment><comment><USER6> I once played a game of Tetris on the Nintendo DS (about 10 years ago now) where I maxed out the lines… then the levels… and then maxed out the score.

I played this same game for weeks, mostly on the train to and from work. And wouldn't you know it, but Tetris DS has a bug that won't let you save a score once you pass 100,000,000 or whatever the highest possible score is.

Tetris got a lot easier when they added the ability to infinitely rotate a block for as long as you want at the top of the pile.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's a related annoying question for which I've never found a conclusive answer: for the standard tetris board (width 10, height 22), is there a strategy for the player that guarantees that they will be able to fill at least one line? or conversely is there a strategy for the game (supplying the pieces) to make the player die without having filled at least one line?

<comment><USER8> Yes, a strategy does exist which can force at least one line in a well of width 10 (and different strategies for 4, 6 and 8). I did a tedious brute- force calculation which demonstrated this a few years back. The code is not particularly presentable and the calculation takes about 11 days on a modern machine (it runs in a single thread), but here: [https://github.com/qntm/tetris](https://github.com/qntm/tetris)

The limiting factor is headroom (the depth of the well). For wells of depth 0, 1 and 2, the AI clearly wins, but once the depth increases enough a strategy becomes possible. My belief is that such a strategy exists for all even well widths, although proving this is annoyingly hard.

<comment><USER7> Hi, thanks a lot for pointing this out to me! However [https://qntm.org/tetris#sec6](https://qntm.org/tetris#sec6) does not have any cases for width 10 where the player wins. Are you implying that you have run more calculations than described in this article, and that the player can win for width 10 with a sufficient high depth?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Tetris" has to be well-defined mathematically before it can be confronted as a problem. Rules governing piece rotation behaviour, piece spawning, piece randomization, wall kicks, loss conditions and even well dimensions need to be laid out first.

<comment><USER10> I have great news for you! [https://tetris.wiki/SRS](https://tetris.wiki/SRS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In classic Tetris you can slide the piece briefly after it lands, so you can always keep the game going.

</comment><comment><USER12> A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

<comment><USER13> To reference: [https://youtu.be/xOCurBYI_gY?t=15m57s](https://youtu.be/xOCurBYI_gY?t=15m57s)

It's fun how program learning to play teris pauses the game just before loosing.

<comment><USER14> Source of the reference is _War Games_ (1983). [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DGNZnfKYnU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DGNZnfKYnU)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've always thought that the mechanics of Tetris are pretty straightforward and it is always possible to arrange incoming pieces without any gaps. The main difficulty for a human player is coming from the increasing speed, not the pieces not fitting together.

<comment><USER16> If you only get z shapes (with the same orientation). Is it then possible to avoid gaps? This is not clear to me at all.

<comment><USER17> You can go infinite if only supplied Ss. You'll have intermediate holes which will be filled in after the above row is cleared

<comment><USER16> Ah yes, of course!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Game of Thrones data leaked in HBO hack - <AUTHOR> https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/08/01/game-of-thrones-data-leaked-in-hbo-hack/ <comment><USER2> tldr?</comment>


Ask HN: What OS do they use at NASA? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Lots of different OSs. Voyager probably doesn't even have an OS. The booster rockets on the shuttle use 8088's and assembler. The mars rovers use vxworks or it's predecessor. And I've heard rumors of embedded linux and QNX for some projects.

Basically you're going to find an OS reasonably suited to the job. Also, you're going to find OLD stuff as NASA wants something where the bugs are known / already worked out. This is why a few years ago they upgraded Hubble to a 486. And why on the rovers it executes code in debug mode and has hardware to interface with the JTAG ports. Everything that works off planet needs to be as bug free as possible and if something goes wrong you need a way to patch it remotely with latencies in the minutes to hours.

</comment><comment><USER3> NASA is very big with many largely separate parts. "All of them" is a reasonable approximation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Mostly Windows, but I have seen Macs too.NASA is not only rockets.It has lots of offices and labs.

</comment><comment><USER5> Many. Ames uses Windows, RHEL, and OSX. The choice is up to the user and division they are in.

</comment><comment><USER6> My father works at the KSC location and his computer runs Windows :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Linux</comment>


How the Windows Subsystem for Linux Redirects Syscalls - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/06/08/wsl-system-calls/ <comment><USER2> > The real NtQueryDirectoryFile API takes 11 parameters

Curiosity got the best of me here: I had to look this up in the docs to see how a linux syscall that takes 3 parameters could possibly take 11 parameters. Spoiler alert: they are used for async callbacks, filtering by name, allowing only partial results, and the ability to progressively scan with repeated calls.

<comment><USER3> This is a recurring pattern in Windows development. Unix devs look at the Windows API and go "This syscall takes 11 parameters? GROAN." But the NT kernel is much more sophisticated and powerful than Linux, so its system calls are going to be necessarily more complicated.

<comment><USER4> Curiosity got the better of me recently when I re-read Russinovich's [NT and VMS - The Rest Of The Story]([http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows- nt-and-vms-re...](http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms- rest-story)), and I bought a copy of [VMS Internals and Data Structures]([http://www.amazon.com/VAX-VMS-Internals-Data- Structures/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/VAX-VMS-Internals-Data- Structures/dp/1555580599)).

Side-by-side, comparing VMS to UNIX, and VMS's approach to a few key areas like I/O, ASTs and tiered interrupt levels are simply just more sophisticated. NT inherited all of that. It was fundamentally superior, as a kernel, to UNIX, from day 1.

I haven't met a single person that has _understood_ NT _and_ Linux/UNIX, and still thinks UNIX is superior as far as the kernels go. I have definitely alienated myself the more I've discovered that though, as it's such a wildly unpopular sentiment in open source land.

Cutler got a call from Gates in 89, and from 89-93, NT was built. He was 47 at the time, and was one of the lead developers of VMS, which was a rock-solid operating system.

In 93, Linus was 22, and starting "implementing enough syscalls until bash ran" as a fun project to work on.

Cutler despised the UNIX I/O model. "Getta byte getta byte getta byte byte byte." The I/O request packet approach to I/O (and tiered interrupts) is one of the key reasons behind NT's superiority. And once you've grok'd things like APCs and structured exception handling, signals just seem absolutely ghastly in comparison.

<comment><USER5> I've never met a single person who understood what they were talking about and referred to a "UNIX kernels". It may be true that Linux was once less advanced than NT - this is no longer the case, despite egregious design flaws in things like epoll. It has simply never been true (for example) for the Illumos (nee Solaris) kernel.

<comment><USER4> I qualified it as "Linux/UNIX kernel" because I wanted to emphasize the kernel and not userspace.

Solaris event ports are good, but they're still ultimately backed by a readiness-oriented I/O model, and can't be used for asynchronous file I/O.

<comment><USER6> Here's a nice graphical comparison of syscalls between Linux and Windows

[http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=392](http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=392)

Are you saying the Windows flow looks like spaghetti only because the software tested software (Apache) wasn't designed for Windows?

<comment><USER4> Heh, 10 years old, original link doesn't work, image is tiny. And it sounds like they were comparing Linux and Apache to IIS and Windows.

It's hard to evaluate this in any way more than "yeah that's a cute spaghetti diagram". If I wanted to drag Linux through the mud visually I'd depict how much time every socket I/O op spends in vfs/fsync stuff. (i.e. you can depict anything to make your point)

<comment><USER6> That might be a cool diagram to show! I honestly know nothing about kernel programming, just happened to come across that a long time ago and bookmarked it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >As of this article, lxss.sys has ~235 of the Linux syscalls implemented with varying level of support.

Is there a list of these syscalls somewhere? It would be cool to check it against the recent Linux API compatibility paper [0, 1].

[0]: [http://oscar.cs.stonybrook.edu/api-compat- study/](http://oscar.cs.stonybrook.edu/api-compat-study/) [1]: [http://www.oscar.cs.stonybrook.edu/papers/files/syspop16.pdf](http://www.oscar.cs.stonybrook.edu/papers/files/syspop16.pdf)

<comment><USER8> You piqued my curiosity - just made one by extracting the syscall dispatch table from lxcore.sys and placing it alongside the Linux syscall list: [https://goo.gl/QHGe1U](https://goo.gl/QHGe1U)

A lot of coverage there, but interesting to see which ones aren't yet implemented, at least in the recent build 14342.

(I used Filippo Valsorda's work from [https://filippo.io/linux-syscall- table](https://filippo.io/linux-syscall-table) as the Linux syscall data source.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have installed the current fast ring build and have tried installing several packages on Windows. Some do install and work (compilers, build environment, node, redis server), but packages that use more advanced socket options (such as Ethereum) or that configure a deamon (most databases), still end with an error. Compatibility is improving with every new build, and you can ditch/reset the whole Linux environment on Windows with a single command, which is nice for testing.

<comment><USER10> They've said the initial intent is for developers to use it, not for running servers / etc (which is why they only target Windows 10 client and not Windows Server OSs).

<comment><USER11> Yup, when I'm developing I need to run pretty much most stuff. I guess, I can install say postgres using the windows native version, but then we are back at square zero.

<comment><USER9> Installing postgres on lxss still ends in a 'syscall not implemented' error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Since NT syscalls follow the x64 calling convention, the kernel does not need to save off volatile registers since that was handled by the compiler emitting instructions before the syscall to save off any volatile registers that needed to be preserved._

Say what? The NT kernel doesn't restore caller-saved registers at syscall exit? This seems extraordinary, because unless it either restores them or zaps them then it will be in danger of leaking internal kernel values to userspace - and if it zaps them then it might as well save and restore them, so userspace won't need to.

<comment><USER4> I think that's referring to the prolog/epilog convention and "homing" of parameter registers, e.g.

Frame struct ReturnAddress dq ? HomeRcx dq ? HomeRdx dq ? HomeR8 dq ? HomeR9 dq ? Frame ends

        NESTED_ENTRY Foo, _TEXT$00

        mov Frame.HomeRcx[rsp], rcx
        mov Frame.HomeRdx[rsp], rcd
        mov Frame.HomeR8[rsp], r8
        mov Frame.HomeR9[rsp], r9

        alloc_stack 64

        END_PROLOG

        ; *do stuff*

        BEGIN_EPILOG

        add rsp, 64

        NESTED_END Foo, _TEXT$00

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/tawsa7cb.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/tawsa7cb.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't think of much that would benefit from this except for, perhaps, headless command line type applications. The one that comes to mind is rsync. Being able to compile the latest version/protocol of rsync on a Linux machine and then running the same binary on a Windows host would be nice but fun seems to end there plus with Cygwin, this is largely a no-brainer without M$ help.

What about applications that hook to X Windows or do things like opening the frame buffer device. I've got a messaging application that can be compiled for both Windows and Linux and depending on the OS, I compile a different transport layer. Under Linux heavy use of epoll is used which is very different than how NT handles Async I/O - especially with sockets. So my application's "transport driver" is either compiling an NT code base using WinSock & OVERLAPPED IO or a Linux code base using EPOLL and pthreads.

Over all it seems like a nice to have but I'm struggling to extract any real benefit.

Can anyone offer up some real good use cases I may be overlooking?

<comment><USER14> There are both free and commercial X servers for Windows, and you can get a linux app running under WSL to work with one of those X servers very easily. I played with it a little bit and it worked fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> With this feature, if you're a Linux developer, you're automatically a Windows developer as well. Almost like being able to run all Android or iOS apps on Windows phones.[1][2]

[1] [http://www.pcworld.com/article/3038652/windows/microsoft- kil...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/3038652/windows/microsoft-kills- project-astoria-the-tool-designed-to-port-android-apps-to-windows-10.html) [2] [https://developer.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/bridges/ios](https://developer.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/bridges/ios)

Edit: Now I am puzzled as to why this got downvoted?

<comment><USER8> If you disassemble lxcore.sys you can still see hints of the Android subsystem project that it grew from: the \Device\adss and /dev/adss devices, the application name Microsoft.Windows.Subsystem.Adss, various function names containing "Adss", and some other textual references to Android.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's too bad that x86 hardware doesn't do virtualization as well as IBM hardware. You can't stack VMs. That's exactly what's needed here - a non- kernel VM that runs above NT but below the application.

<comment><USER17> You can have nested VMs.

[https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/virtual/kvm/nested-...](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/virtual/kvm/nested- vmx.txt)

<comment><USER18> Windows also now supports nested virtualization.

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/hyperv_on_wi...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/hyperv_on_windows/user_guide/nesting)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > the Linux fork syscall has no _documented_ equivalent for Windows

Emphasis is mine. I wonder if this is something that cygwin could (ab)use. Also I wonder why they would need this undocumented call.

<comment><USER20> Cygwin is layered above Win32. Win32 has no provision to nicely handle forks. So even if there was an NT API fork syscall (I'm don't think there is on Windows 10, WSL does not use the NT API, there is not any more Posix/SFU/{Whatever Unix NT classic subsys of the day} as far as I know), this would not go anywhere.

<comment><USER21> > So even if there was an NT API fork syscall

You can do it with NtCreateProcess: [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/microsoft.public.win32.progr...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/microsoft.public.win32.programmer.kernel/ejtHCZmdyaI/k0D0Jinx9KwJ)

(The Win32 userland won't understand what you did, but you can still do it.)

<comment><USER20> Well, you can do it on some versions of Windows. On Windows 10, and even future version of Windows 10, not so sure...

<comment><USER22> Windows 10 is still windows NT. The NT native API is widely used these days. It would be a huge departure for MS to stop supporting it in future versions of windows.

<comment><USER20> Most parts of the NT API have never been officially documented, officially supported, stable (in the "won't change" meaning), and the tiny parts that have actually been documented come with caveats that they are susceptible to change. Supporting fork through the NT API forever makes no sense if there are no users anymore. They could continue to do it for no specific reason, just because fork is internally needed by WSL for example, and so because it is easy to export the capability through the NT API, but I really don't see why they would _necessarily_ do that.

<comment><USER22> MS has historically maintained compatibility with even undocumented APIs. Of course that could change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anybody know how fork() is implemented? This blog post kind of sounds like fork() would do the slow emulation of it through CreateProcess().

<comment><USER20> fork() is properly implemented by the NT kernel. WSL is _not_ layered above Win32.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Excellent post, Jack.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting, I wonder how much overhead is added to syscalls to look up the process type. Does NT still do this check when no WSL processes are running?

<comment><USER11> Pretty sure these are different entry points, so you wouldn't need to do anything different for normal Windows processes whether WSL is running or not.

<comment><USER14> I don't think so... both linux and windows binaries are using the same SYSCALL cpu instruction, and thus must be going to the same handler in the NT kernel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does Microsoft document all system calls?

<comment><USER26> They document the WinAPI, but how that talks to the kernel is not documented. You can talk to it directly if you want, but there is nothing from Microsoft on how to do that. So if you see those as the true system calls, they are not documented at all.

<comment><USER20> Well, tiny parts of the NT API (callable from userspace) are documented, but then often with the caveat that they are not stable (in practice, even some undocumented ones can be considered stable if used by enough programs in the wild, especially if they are simple and standalone and have no Win32 equivalent)

The very precise mechanism, though, is extremely unstable. For example virtually every release of Windows (even sometimes SP) changes the syscall numbers. You have to go through the ntdll, which is kind of a more heavyweight version of the Linux VDSO. (The NTDLL approach was invented way before the VDSO, though)

<comment><USER27> Ntdll is similar to VDSO in the sense that it is loaded into the memory space of every userspace process. Even that I think might have exceptions on the Linux side. Either way, unlike VDSO, Ntdll actually does export functions potentially useful when called from the program. Here is an interesting read. [http://undocumented.ntinternals.net/](http://undocumented.ntinternals.net/)

<comment><USER20> What do you think the VDSO is used for? It also exports "functions potentially useful when called from the program".

The approach is a little different though; ntdll exports all of the NT API, and you need to go through it to reach the NT API in a somehow more stable way than using syscall numbers. OTOH, the VDSO exports only virtual syscalls that gain (or have gained in the past) from being performed in userspace, and even then corresponding syscalls still exist in the kernel, with both stable numbers and even a stable API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yes, yes, but can we run Wine on it?

</comment><comment><USER29> wtf is "pico process" and "pico driver"?

<comment><USER30> [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/05/23/pico- process...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/05/23/pico-process- overview/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Step 1: embrace

</comment><comment><USER32> Funny they don't mention ioctl.

</comment><comment><USER33> Next step is Microsoft basically needs to turn Windows into a flavour of Linux. If they don't, they're under massive pincer threat from Android and Chrome, which are rapidly becoming the consumer endpoints of the future. Windows is about to "do an IBM" and throw away a market that it created. See PS/2 and OS/2.

They should probably just buy Canonical. That would put the shivers into Google, properly.

<comment><USER34> Funny years ago i would have _reflexively_ flabbergasted at the thought of microsoft buying canonical (or any linux distro producer)...but actually thinking on that concept, and seeing recent (perhaps less-than-hostile) approach that microsoft has taken towards open source and linux, that wouldn't be a bad idea. I mean if microsoft could have both offerings - for windows servers and ubuntu-installed servers - i suppose that would be a very smart business move. Assuming they don't actually butcher or deny resources to whatever linux company they would buy, i could see several benefits - not only to microsoft but to developers, system integrators, etc. worldwide. Hey if a side benefit is that it would spur the market (a la google, apple, etc.) a little - to the benefit of us civilians - that's cool too.

<comment><USER35> I think Microsoft should do what Apple did with BSD Unix aka Nextstep and merge it with their old OS.

Microsoft should take the Windows GUI and put it over Linux as a desktop manager. Microsoft could sell the Windows GUI for Linux users that want to run Windows apps.

<comment><USER33> Could not agree more. Windows WM as an option on Linux is a clear and logical strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I use to run Linux in a VM on windows and use Chocolatey for package management and cygwin and powershell etc, then I realized I was just trying to make Windows into Linux. Seems to be the way things are going and with the addition of the linux subsystem it kind of proves that Windows really isn't a good OS on it's own, especially not for developers.

I wish Windows/MS would abandon NT and just create a Linux distro. I don't know anyone who particularly likes NT and jamming multiple systems together seems like an awful idea.

Windows services and Linux services likely won't play nice together (think long file paths created by Linux services and other incompatibilities), for them to be 100% backward compatible they need to not only make Windows compatible with the things Linux outputs, but Linux compatible with the things windows services output, and to keep the Linux people from figuring out how to use Windows on Linux systems they'd need to make a lot of what they do closed source.

So I don't see a Linux+Windows setup being deployed for production. It's cool for developers, but even then you can't do much real world stuff that utilizes both windows and Linux. If you're only taking advantage of one system then whats the point of having two?

I went ahead and made the switch to Linux since I was trying to make Windows behave just like Linux.

<comment><USER21> > I wish Windows/MS would abandon NT and just create a Linux distro. I don't > know anyone who particularly likes NT and jamming multiple systems together > seems like an awful idea.

I do. The NT kernel is pretty clean and well architected. (Yes, there are mistakes and cruft in it, but Unix has that in spades.) It's not "jamming multiple systems together"; an explicit design goal of the NT kernel was to support multiple userland APIs in a unified manner. Darwin is a much better example of a messy kernel, with Mach and FreeBSD mashed together in a way that neither was designed for.

It's the Win32 API that is the real mess. Having a better officially supported API to talk to the NT kernel can only be a good thing, from my point of view.

<comment><USER20> Well, large parts of the NT API are very close from Win32 API for obvious reasons, and so are often in the realm of dozen of params and even more crazy Ex functions. Internally there are redundancies that do not make much sense (like multiple versions of mutex or spinlock depending on which parts of kernel space use them, IIRC), and some whole picture aspects of Windows makes no sense at all given the architectural cost it induces (Winsock split in half between userspace and obviously needed kernel support is just completely utterly crazy, beyond repair, it makes so little sense you want to go back in past and explain the designer of that mess how stupid this is). The initial approach of NT subsystems was absolutely insane (hard dep on a NT API core, so can't do emulation with classic NT subsystems - so either limited to OS having some technical similarities like OS/2, or very small communities when doing a new target like the Posix or SFU was) -- WSL makes complete sense, though, but it is maybe a little late to the party. Classic NT subsystems are of so little use that MS did not even use them for their own Metro and then UWP things, even though they would like very hard to distinguish that more from Win32 and make the world consider Win32 as legacy. I've read the original paper motivating to put Posix in an NT subsystem, and it contained no real strong point, only repeated incantations that this will be better in an NT subsystem and worse if done otherwise (well for fork this is obvious, but the paper was not even focused on that), with none of the limitations I've explained above ever considered.

Still considering the whole system, an instable user kernel interface has few advantages and tons of drawbacks. MS is extremely late to the chroot and then container party because of that (and let's remember that the core technology behind WSL emerged because they wanted to solve the chroot aside userspace system on their OS in the first place, _NOT_ because they wanted to run Linux binaries) -- so yet another point why classic NT subsystems are useless.

Back to core kernel stuff, IRQL model is shit. Does not make any sense when you consider what really happens, and you can't really use arbitrary multiple levels. It seems cute and clean and all of that, but Linux approach of top and bottom halves and kernel and user threads might seem messy but is actually far more usable. Another point: now everybody uses multiprocessor computers, but back in the day the multiple HAL were also a false good idea. MS recognize it now and only want to handle ACPI computers, even on ARM. Other OSes do all kind of computers... Cutler pretended to not like the "everything is a file" approach, but NT does basically the same thing with "everything is a handle". And soon enough, you hit exactly the same conceptual limitations (except not in the same places) that not everything is actually the same, so that cute abstraction leaks soon enough (well, it does in any OS).

On a more result oriented approach, one of the things WSL makes clear is that file operations are very slow (just compare an exactly identical file heavy workload under WSL and then under a real Linux)

So of course there are (probably) some good parts, like in any mainstream kernel, but there are also some quite dark corners, and I am not an expert about all architectural design of NT but I'm not a fan of the parts I know, and I strongly prefer the Linux way to do equivalent things.

<comment><USER37> > Cutler pretended to not like the "everything is a file" approach, but NT > does basically the same thing with "everything is a handle". And soon > enough, you hit exactly the same conceptual limitations (except not in the > same places) that not everything is actually the same, so that cute > abstraction leaks soon enough (well, it does in any OS).

Explain? Pretty much the only thing you can do with a handle is to release it. That's very different from a file, which you can read, write, delete, modify, add metadata to, etc... handles aren't even an abstraction over anything, they're just a resource management mechanism.

<comment><USER20> You are right, but those points are details. FD under modern Unixes (esp. Linux, but probably others) serves exactly the same purpose (resource management). The FD where read/write can't be used just don't define those (same principle for other syscalls) -- similarly if you try to NtReadFile on an incompatible Handle it will also give you an error back. Both are in a single numbering space per process. NT largely makes use of NtReadFile / NtWriteFile to communicate with drivers, even in quite core Windows components (Winsock and AFD). And NT Handles do serve at least an abstraction (I know of): they can be signaled, and waited for with WaitFor*Objects.

So the naming distinction is quite arbitrary.

<comment><USER37> > You are right, but those points are details.

Uh, no, they are _very crucial_ details. For example, it means the difference between letting root delete /dev/null like any other "file" on Linux, versus an admin not being able to delete \Device\Null on Windows because it isn't a "file". The nonsense Linux lets you do because it treats everything like a "file" is the problem here. It's not a naming issue.

<comment><USER38> Linux has plenty of file descriptor types that do not correspond to a path, along with virtual file systems where files cannot be deleted...

Your example of device files is hardly universal, and the way it works is useful.

<comment><USER37> And to give you another example, look at how many people bricked their computers because Linux decided EFI variables were files. You can blame the vendors all you want, but the reality is this would not have happened (and, mind you, it would have been INTUITIVE to every damn user) if the OS was sane and just let people use efibootmgr instead of treating every bit and its mother as files. Just because you have a gun doesn't mean you HAVE to try shooting youself, you know? That holds even if the manufacturer was supposed to have put a safety lock on the trigger, by the way. Sometimes some things just don't make sense, if that makes sense.

<comment><USER39> How many people really did this compared to eg windows users attacked by cryptolocker?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> .

<comment><USER41> "As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like _servus puer_ meant about the same thing as _puer servus_ , and even in English _slave boy_ meant _boy slave_. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that _house cat_ did not mean _cat house_ , and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in _mihi amicus_ , was somehow conveyed by _dog food_ or _sentry box_ even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like _fallout survival shelter_? Brother Francis shook his head."

<comment><USER11> What is this from ?

<comment><USER41> Walter Miller's _A Canticle for Leibowitz_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Pretty neat stuff. I think that MS should just create their own Linux Distribution & port all MS products. Get rid of the Windows NT Kernel. I believe it's outdated & doesn't have the same update cycle that the Linux Kernel has.

Why run a Linux Application/binary on a windows server OS? When you can just run it on Linux OS and get better performance & stability.

<comment><USER43> What makes you believe it's outdated?

<comment><USER36> Can you show me the source so I can check?

<comment> UK-AL Actually there was a leak for 2000, most critics said it was surprisingly good.

<comment><USER4> There are leaks galore. NT4, 2000, and more recently, the Windows Research Kit. Just google something like 'apcobj.c' and see. (Hah, first link was a github repo!)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


'South Park' won't air as scheduled for the first time because of a power outage - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/16/4846610/south-park-no-power-lol

<comment><USER2> 3rd-hand blog spam.

[http://www.southparkstudios.com/news/j2j34b/episode-1704-wil...](http://www.southparkstudios.com/news/j2j34b/episode-1704-will- not-air-tonight)</comment>


Ask HN: Facebook Apps - Develop yourself or outsource? - <AUTHOR>

Let's say I have an idea for a FB App. Should I develop the app on my own or try to outsource?
I need to say that I'm sort-of a developer myself and I have CS university in my background but other then that nothing related to building FB apps.
Cheers, Daniel <comment><USER2> I would suggest creating 1 or 2 simple FB apps like quiz, gifts etc to get the feel of developing FB Apps. Firstly, you will learn about FB API's, secondly you can gauge how easy/hard it is to develop and accordingly do a cost analysis between self developing versus outsourcing. And, even if you outsource it, you would be able to maintain/fix bugs locally.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am generally strongly opposed to outsourcing, but the Facebook API is a moving target and generally considered very poorly documented. There's also not much example code out there that still works with the current SDKs. I've had a very hard time learning it.

I guess it depends how well you trust your existing outsourcing relationships vs. how much time you have to devote to this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hello, Daniel. I think that you should develop it yourself, or find a partner who may develop it. I think when you start an app, you need to be fast to change, and envolve. So, if you have a outsorce development team, you may loose those things. And, as you have a CS background, you will learn fast how to build an app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Zeuf.. You really make a great point there. I haven't thought about how dynamic an app must be.

Thanks for the advice.</comment></comment>


Princesses Are Not Great Role Models for Girls - <AUTHOR> https://thewire.in/157668/princess-role-model-little-girls/ <comment><USER2> I agree with the title, as it's not optimal for role models to be primarily women who have power, success and happiness because they were born into it by luck.

However:

"Mulan is a bold Chinese warrior, respected and followed by her people…all of whom think she is a man, because she has deceived them by cutting her hair. The point here appears to be that to become a good leader, a woman should look and act like a man."

This person has _severely_ misunderstood the point of Mulan.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I was wondering if I was the only one who noticed that as well. The entire point of Mulan was to show that regardless of your gender you could be a powerful leader and warrior. Her pretending to be a man is there to show you that the gender roles are bunk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "With Pocahontas (1995), for example, Disney showed that not even cartoon women can "have it all". The Indian princess must choose between success in the public sphere and a happy romantic life."

If you make a movie about life in a society which does not value women equally, how can you be surprised that the movie does not present them as such.

"Mulan is a bold Chinese warrior, respected and followed by her people…all of whom think she is a man, because she has deceived them by cutting her hair. The point here appears to be that to become a good leader, a woman should look and act like a man."

I mean....what? Is that the lesson you got out of that movie??? It's an _extremely_ shallow interpretation of the message here, one that almost seems bent just to fit a certain narrative.

"But, the protagonist Elsa has dubious leadership skills. As the elder sister, she is responsible for governing, but when she gets nervous she lets her emotions get the better of her. Despite her good intentions, she cannot effectively wield power.

As a result, she freezes her realm and withdraws into a solitary world. In other words, she lacks emotional intelligence."

Once again, you are trying to make the interpretation fit the narration. Maybe she is just portrayed as a normal human being who has flaws, not a perfect-in- every-way robot? Wouldn't a film where the main character never makes any mistakes and has perfect control of their emotions be just.....boring? If anything, I'm really bothered by the fact that in those movies men are shown as having zero emotions whatsoever, as if men should have everything planned out beforehand - what a stupid idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> I agreed with the premise of the article: I don't want my daughters to feel they are hapless beings designed for a man's pleasure.

But I departed about halfway through the article, at "gender free toys."

It's no secret that _on average_ , women tend to be more empathetic than men, and men tend to be more assertive/combative than women. There are of course exceptions to this rule, and of course, reasons why each sex should develop both skills.

However, after reading "Now, Discover Your Strengths" it's also _vitally_ important that you play to your natural strengths more than anything. For a large percentage of women, this _may_ mean developing the very valuable skill of empathy, and for men, this _may_ mean learning to control and focus their natural aggression. Gender oriented toys can help children develop these skills at a young age.

There's a wide spectrum of overlap between men and women but denying the very obvious truth that they are inherently different is not only ridiculous but can disable people from using their natural abilities to suceed.

<comment><USER6> Amen!

How do you feel about the marketing, though? I don't object to my daughter reveling in dolls, fancy clothes, and Playmobil, but I do object to specific character brands being pushed at her. I feel they collapse the imagination space too much.

I have, somewhat shockingly to my sneering internal 13 year old boy, allowed My Little Pony branding through my relatively strict anti-brand filter, because the female characters are surprisingly reasonable.

But on the whole, it's a struggle. Every other product my daughter sees at Target is a branded Disney product, and even though she's never even seen most of the characters animated, she's drawn like a moth to a flame.

<comment><USER7> the relentless pinking and bluing of toys is pretty objectionable, and reduces what children feel allowed to like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any analysis is incomplete if all it look at is the protagonist without looking at the mirror image that is the antagonist. Each film is only as good as its villain, so what does a typical Disney villain look like and what gender/attributes do they have?

In Pocahontas the antagonist is the exploiter, the disrupter of natural order, and the destroyer, and male. In Hercules he is the manipulator and manifestation of evil. In Mulan he is represented as the mindless horde of destroyers. In frozen he is the liar, the cheater, the bully. In Aladdin it is the mustache-twirling, eye-rolling, leering, and old man.

There is a small minority of Disney movies that have a female antagonist, but they are all version of the same evil witch stereotype. Old, infertile, predator of children.

So what does this teach children about social behavior and crime? What about who deserve sympathy and who is redeemable? About conflict resolution and handling of blame?

Disney movies aren't the best places if we want to avoid stereotypes, and that include the newer movies like Frozen.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a good and interesting article, with which I largely agree (I impose more extreme limitations on princess products than this author is calling for, in fact).

But this statement, which the author implies is problematic:

"A successful public life interferes in a woman's private life."

Just seems true, regardless of whether you replace woman with person.

Pretending all adults have limitless capacity to be SuperFamily while simultaneously being SuperWorkerBee just seems silly.

As it happens, I tend to think The Kids Are Alright is a pretty good way of thinking about family/work compromises; it's mostly about adult's preference to be all things to all people, not about kids' needs.

In a way, I think this idea we're super accessible to kids even when working hard actually can lead to worse parent child engagement. Really high quality interactions often take planning, and if you're too busy beating yourself up over missing bedtime, you don't take the time to plan that special activity.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thank god. If ever I am lucky enough to have a daughter I hope to expose her to the vivacious and remarkable women throughout history, be they scientists or explorers or athletes.

The reality for most actual Princesses throughout history is depressing and off-putting, and the fantasy is saccharine and irresponsible.

</comment><comment><USER10> Another biased article completely failing to address the natural tendencies toward "gender roles". Yes, maybe society tends to enforce them, but kids are not blank slates waiting for gender assignment.

There's a difference between "back off the pink and guns" vs "respect natural tendencies, and variations thereto".

</comment><comment><USER7> If you want good role models for girls the book _Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls_ might be interesting.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Night-Stories-Rebel- Girls/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Night-Stories-Rebel- Girls/dp/014198600X)

</comment><comment><USER11> Do most people really not realize this? Teach your kids to be human and capable, not princesses and scared of everything.

</comment><comment><USER12> _1\. Leadership is male.

2\. Women are better leaders when they look and act like men.

3\. A successful public life interferes in a woman's private life.

4\. When women get emotionally involved, they lose rational thought, and their leadership capacity fails them._

I couldn't agree more.

<comment><USER13> Please quote this in context! The author is criticizing those stereotypes.

<comment><USER12> I don't agree with the author. With a few notable exceptions, these tend to be truisms in my experience.</comment></comment></comment>


What's Functional Programming All About? - <AUTHOR> http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/WhatsFunctionalProgrammingAllAbout.html <comment><USER2> This is the best description of data flows used in functional programming I have ever seen. Really well done.</comment>


Got fired, told I was going to be vested and now they want to rescind the offer - <AUTHOR>

I was fired from a startup 6 weeks before my first year of vesting, (my guess is mainly because they are running out of funding and I was the most expensive employ) but I was told in the exit interview that they would make that day my vesting cliff, because I had worked very hard and deserved (their words not mine).
Two weeks later I get a call from the CEO telling me that they wont vest me. I have the exit interview recorded stating that they would vest me. Is there anything I can do?
I am in a state were its legal to record voice conversations: http://www.vegress.com/images/vegress/notification-map-550a.jpg
The two options that I am thinking about is to either lawyer up, or right a blog post so future employs know what kind of people they are dealing with, or both.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I would go back to them and state that you have a recording with their promise of vesting. Make sure to read all the verbiage that you signed previously. Don't make it public at all. It is good you haven't yet. Make sure that the person who gave the comment about having your vesting cliff had the authority to make that comment. If there is law where you are that makes verbal agreements legitimate and the one who gave the agreement has authority to make that arrangement, then you have a pretty solid case.

I wouldn't threaten to go public and all that nonsense because it makes both parties look bad and even if you are in the right, future companies might see you as a trouble maker.

cross the "T"s and dot the "I"s, and if that pans out and they don't respond to your initial statement, lawyer up.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that, I am working with the company now to see if we can get an amicable solution. (it took them a week to answer my emails)</comment></comment>


Show HN: DronaHQ NoCode App Development Platform  - Mobile first! - <AUTHOR> https://dronahq.com <comment><AUTHOR> Author here: We have been working on NoCode Tooling with a team of 20 engineers since last 20 months. We are super excited to launch it & would love to hear your comments/feedback.

Core modules: a. Visual designer b. Work flow engine c. Rule Engine d. DB as a service e. API engine f. Developer Modules: Build custom functions + custom visual components g. Market place (upcoming) - for ready apps

Target use cases: building front end apps, front end apps with API integration, front end apps + workflows, Fully functional systems like CRM/ERP, etc

Target customers: SMBs, department apps, citizen developers.

</comment><comment><USER2> I was thinking "oh interesting", but then I had to take a dive and see you're using Cordova. Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> DronaHQ Mobile endpoint comes as a container with an ability to package and ship micro apps from the cloud. This gives an advantage to build multiple small micro apps within a single app. The microapps are powered by Cordova. So NoCode tooling enables to build a microapp in HTML/JS/CSS which when published, gets packaged & deployed on the container.

<comment><USER2> I understood that from the docs, but why is Cordova your choice of tooling?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That looks something interesting !</comment>


Linux kernel fix for "Stack Clash" breaks Java apps - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1699772 <comment><AUTHOR> A fix is being worked on: [https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel- discuss/2017-...](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel- discuss/2017-June/017507.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> The RedHat bug tracking this: [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1464185](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1464185)</comment>


NY auto dealers trying to shut down Tesla Motors in NY - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/348112948230774784 <comment><USER2> Because the government is completely ran by corporations and Musk isn't in "the club" (yet). Gone are the days where the consumer is uneducated and the supplier doesn't have a way to easily and effectively communicate with customers everywhere from anywhere.

There's a pretty good doc on Netflix, "Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream", which covers some of the financial backing of congress and how it affects things (although that's not the primary focus). I'm sure this plays out at a state level, too. I witnessed it first hand growing up in Eastern Kentucky and how the coal companies threw their money and weight around.

<comment><USER3> Are you telling me Space X, Tesla, and Solar City haven't had any special deals with the government? This is the funniest thing I've read on HN.

<comment><USER4> Special deals? Can you point some out? All that I am aware of are programs that were offered to many companies. SpaceX's relationship with NASA is not special, other companies are/have been in the COTS program. The tax benefits/rebates/carbon trading shit that Tesla benefits from is available to any car company that wishes to participate. My understanding is that Solar City is in more or less the same situation as Tesla, though they are not really "Elon's" company.

<comment><USER5> Well, there's the "2008 Bailout of Very, Very High-Net-Worth Individuals Who Invested in Tesla Motors Act"...

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30digi.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30digi.html)

<comment><USER6> This article doesn't describe what actually ended up happening. They didn't get any money as part of the auto bailout. They did get a loan the next year under a separate program that funded high-efficiency vehicles under DOE, but unlike the auto bailout they had to demonstrate financial solvency to be eligible, and Musk (granted, not a neutral observer) has said they didn't need the money to keep the doors open; it just allowed them to accelerate production of the model S. For what it's worth, they've already paid it all back, ahead of schedule.

In any event, given that they were neither the only green company to get loans under this program, nor the only car company to get loans of any kind in light of the bailout, this hardly strikes me as a "special deal from the government." The grant program existed, they applied for it, they got an award.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "My dear colleagues, every day great quantities of wood come into Paris, and draw out of it large sums of money. If this goes on, we shall all be ruined in three years, and what will become of the poor people? [Bravo.] Let us prohibit foreign wood. I am not speaking for myself, for you could not make a tooth- pick out of all the wood I own. I am, therefore, perfectly disinterested. [Good, good.] But here is Pierre, who has a park, and he will keep our fellow- citizens from freezing. They will no longer be in a state of dependence on the charcoal dealers of the Yonne. Have you ever thought of the risk we run of dying of cold, if the proprietors of these foreign forests should take it into their heads not to bring any more wood to Paris? Let us, therefore, prohibit wood. By this means we shall stop the drain of specie, we shall start the wood-chopping business, and open to our workmen a new source of labor and wages. [Applause.]"

\-- Bastiat, Sophisms of the Protectionists

[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20161/20161-h/20161-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20161/20161-h/20161-h.htm)

<comment><USER8> May I add:

"To rob the public, it is necessary to deceive them. To deceive them, it is necessary to persuade them that they are robbed for their own advantage, and to induce them to accept in exchange for their property, imaginary services, and often worse. Hence spring Sophisms in all their varieties. Then, since Force is held in check, Sophistry is no longer only an evil; it is the genius of evil, and requires a check in its turn. This check must be the enlightenment of the public, which must be rendered more subtle than the subtle, as it is already stronger than the strong."

\-- Bastiat, Sophisms of the Protectionists

<comment><USER9> Damn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any evidence to back up Musk's claim? Being a Senator's employee must be annoying sometimes.

"Hi, I'm calling to defend Telsa Motors because its CEO told me to. No, I do not know anything more about the topic I am calling about"

<comment><USER11> He referenced the bill shortly thereafter:

[http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?bn=S05725&term=2013](http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?bn=S05725&term=2013) [http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=A07844&term...](http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=A07844&term=2013&Summary=Y&Text=Y)

<comment><USER12> English, specifically whatever dialect that is, is a horrible medium for encoding laws.

Further, the diffing format used there is atrocious.

Law is code. Why haven't we fixed this yet?

<comment><USER13> > Law is code. Why haven't we fixed this yet?

Properly drafted English-language laws do read as code. It's like how you can describe formal logic in English: "All Americans wear hats. I am an American. Therefore I wear a hat."

I take it you're arguing for something like Lojban, though. I see two problems there. First, it's not the (de facto) national language, which infringes on one's fundamental right to read the laws of the land. Second, and probably more incurably, these types of languages don't remove the most important kinds of ambiguity in laws.

Most disputes over ambiguity in legal text do not arise from _syntactic_ ambiguity. It's not usually confusion over what words the "not" modifies, or which "if" is nested within which. Rather, most problems arise from _semantic_ ambiguity, i.e. the meaning of the individual words. What constitutes a "bank," exactly? What does it mean to do something "in a reasonable period of time?" If you're "bearing" arms, where exactly are you bearing them?

You might argue that the problem then comes down to defining your terms well. That's certainly a noble goal when drafting legal text. But one of the principle goals of legal drafting is to make the text flexible enough to apply to specific circumstances that the authors could not have foreseen. This, of course, is in constant tension with the need to be precise. The more precise you are, the easier it is to interpret the law, but the more likely it is that someone will find a loophole arising from the excessive narrowness of your language.

A language like Lojban won't alleviate these difficulties, unfortunately.

<comment><USER14> > First, it's not the (de facto) national language, which infringes on one's > fundamental right to read the laws of the land...

Legaleese requires you to take years of law classes to even understand, and makes the same problem. I think it's more accessible to run something through a compiler...

<comment><USER15> > Legaleese requires you to take years of law classes to even understand

This is why I'm against EULAs. As a non-lawyer, it's an asymmetrical game--I have no idea what the legaleese I'm agreeing to actually means in a court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I applaud Tesla for trying super hard to disrupt the current selling model that's existed for decades. I understand why existing participants in the market wonder why this new competitor can play by a different set of rules. The irony is that once (if) Tesla starts selling cars in significant volume their purely direct/internet/word of mouth model will break down and they'll probably find themselves....... establishing dealerships!

<comment><USER17> >The irony is that once (if) Tesla starts selling cars in significant volume their purely direct/internet/word of mouth model will break down and they'll probably find themselves....... establishing dealerships!

How come? In my experience dealerships provide a horrible experience, where you're always thinking "how am I being ripped off here?". What value do they provide that is suddenly required once you reach scale?

<comment><USER16> Short answer: Think "the Apple Store" of car dealerships. Long answer: I don't think the mass market is in Tesla's future anymore. They're too late. There are too many competitive new entry level entrants from Honda, Nissan, Ford etc. I don't think Musk cares. He strikes me as a guy with a mission - to get us off fossil fuels - and he's doing that. I think his deal to supply the motor industry shows you where Tesla will be. Kind of like an "Intel Inside" strategy (total wild guess)

<comment><USER18> > There are too many competitive new entry level entrants from Honda, Nissan, > Ford etc.

I completely lost you there. Where are these competitive new entry level models?

e.g.: The Nissan Leaf absolutely does not compare with the Model S in range, speed, style, ecosystem, internals, etc, etc.

There really is no EV competition for Tesla. There is competition from non-EV luxury vehicles, but Tesla is beating most of them in price/performance and customer satisfaction.

<comment><USER19> Of _course_ the Leaf doesn't begin to stack up to the Model S in those ways. The Leaf is $35k; the base Model S starts at $70k. It is _literally_ twice as expensive.

Would you be impressed if I told you all the ways a BMW 7-series was superior to a Corolla?

Besides, your parent said:

 _... entry level entrants ..._

I would argue that the Leaf is _far, far, FAR_ more of an entry level electric car than a Tesla. Silicon Valley sometimes makes us think otherwise, but most of the USA _isn 't_ full of people who can easily afford a $70k+ vehicle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I general, I find it bizarre that a law should exist, that protects some middleman position. Isn't it nonsense to protect such monopoly through the law? How can it coexist with the antitrust regulations?

<comment><USER16> If you find a law that's been on the books for a long time "bizarre" show some restraint. There is likely a very good set of reasons for its existence. Go and research those and see if you agree with them or not. But these "I'm totally bewildered how could this possibly be?!" comments add very little.

<comment><USER20> If instead of brushing it off you could explain what those reasons are, it could be more helpful. Thus my question. If you don't know them and assume they exist - I'm not convinced. There are bad laws which are pushed in by various lobbies (like DMCA). The fact that they can exist long is not a proof of the sanity of such laws.

<comment><USER21> This Planet Money podcast:

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-435-why- buying-a-car-is-so-awful)

and this paper (PDF)

[http://faculty.som.yale.edu/FionaScottMorton/documents/State...](http://faculty.som.yale.edu/FionaScottMorton/documents/StateFranchiseLawsDealerTerminationsandtheAutoCrisis.pdf)

Should be a useful primer. It explains how the dealership/franchise structure came to be, and why automakers prefer this model today.

<comment><USER20> I listened to the podcast. So it boils down to the fact that in the past manufacturers had really rough relations with dealers, and the later passed tons of protection laws which gave them essentially a solid monopoly. And most of those reasons have no meaning today.

Though I didn't get the part that fighting that now is futile (there were not enough details in the story). If enough people will be against these laws - they'll be cancelled, no matter how much power these dealers wield.

<comment><USER19> Your parent didn't say fighting it was futile. Your parent said _automakers prefer this model today._

<comment><USER20> I was commenting on the podcast, which makes a point that _" fighting is futile"._

<comment><USER21> You can find all the people you want to oppose these kinds of laws but, as they say, money talks.

In a lot of political districts, the local auto dealer contributes more in taxes to the state/district/municipality than any group of citizens does. When these dealers call their congressman, the call gets answered.

<comment><USER20> So, it's a legal monopoly which results in poor customer service and overpriced products? Some really weird legal / economical quirk. Fighting unhealthy monopoly can be successful, even if they have tons of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> [http://www.latfor.state.ny.us/maps/?sec=2012s](http://www.latfor.state.ny.us/maps/?sec=2012s) seems to be the best place to figure out what district you are in.

While you are at it, ask your senator to protect pedestrians. [http://www.streetsblog.org/2013/06/21/marty-golden-needs- to-...](http://www.streetsblog.org/2013/06/21/marty-golden-needs-to-hear-from- new-yorkers-who-want-speed-cameras/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Dealers in North Carolina are attempting a similar tactic.

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/05/13/north_car...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/05/13/north_carolina_tesla_ban_bill_would_prevent_unfair_competition_with_car.html)

UPDATE: Actually it appears Tesla is having a rough go of it in a lot of states, Colorado being the first one to oppose their efforts:

[http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20130525/APF/130525068...](http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20130525/APF/1305250680)

</comment><comment><USER24> Title should really say "NY State Senators." (It used to say NY Senators which I would assume is NY US Senators, but it's been changed.)

<comment><USER25> "NY State Senators _allegedly_ trying to shut down Tesla Motors in NY" would be nice too. Though really, even that's incorrect: it's the automakers who are alleged to be doing this, not state senators. But screw it, let's spread some FUD. Let me go post on Facebook about how the government is trying to destroy Elon Musk.

<comment><USER26> Acutally, no. State Senators Zeldin and Carlucci sponsored a bill that it would make it impossible for Tesla to operate in NYS. Now while New York Auto Dealers is likely to have lobbied for this bill, the State Senators nominally wrote the legislation and sponsored the bill.

In New York, the legislative session is winding down, so it is a particularly dangerous time for bad legislation to be introduced.

<comment><USER27> I'll be interested in seeing how those senators feel about tax revenue lost if lots of people end up going out of state to buy expensive cars. It's not like it's that hard to find a border to go across in New York.

<comment><USER28> Without looking, I'm going to say it's a pretty safe bet that New York has taxes that take effect when you transfer a car in-state.

<comment><USER29> I don't believe that's true. You don't get charged sales tax multiple times just because you're moving your property to another state.

That being said, I doubt a low volume car constitutes any significant amount of tax revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Status update: The NY State Senate appears to be unconvinced.

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/348157673944014848](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/348157673944014848)

</comment><comment><USER30> If you live in New York, please contact your senator and let him know what you think, regardless of your opinion. [http://www.nysenate.gov/senators](http://www.nysenate.gov/senators)

</comment><comment><USER31> I will appreciate if anyone can address me some explanation about this matter. Personally I want to know why auto dealers want to shut down Tesla, aren't they just dealers, are they?

<comment><USER32> They want to force Tesla to go through them, instead of selling direct to consumer. Tesla not going through the dealerships is bad for the dealerships business.

<comment><USER31> So it's a middlemen problem against evolution. It's sad they don't get it and preffer to fight it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> My favorite part is when he didn't say how or why

<comment><USER34> Sure he did, in subsequent tweets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Good old competition.

<comment><USER36> In this case, competition between campaign donors for state senators in NY.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A source? Is it a proposed bill or a rumor?

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't understand why Elon can't register another corp to be an exclusive dealer for Tesla?

Or not an exclusive, but add an outrageous fee to become a member of "Tesla Dealer" club.</comment>


Mixely – An offline social network - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on this side project on and off for about 2 years now. We are kinda keeping things exclusive for now but we already have over 300 users mostly by inviting people from communities like this to join and provide feedback.
If you're a curious person or just an early adopter of new things, let us know what you think about http://mixely.com/.
There's also a medium article that goes more in depth here https://medium.com/@razmakhin/friendship-for-everyone-d320be21fdee
Thanks, Sean <comment><USER2> Posts without URLs get penalized. You'd be better off posting a story with the url, then adding your text as a comment to the thread.

However, people here are more likely to respond favorably if there's something they can try now (without requesting an invite) or at least some in-depth detail about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clickable - [http://mixely.com/](http://mixely.com/)

Article on Mixely - [https://medium.com/@razmakhin/friendship-for- everyone-d320be...](https://medium.com/@razmakhin/friendship-for- everyone-d320be21fdee)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you sir!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reads like a hybrid of meetup.com...

The description of "An offline social network" will make some folks think of something else entirely.

Maybe another description without the word "social" or "offline" might work.

<comment><USER5> Phantom_oracle, I've been looking for your contact info to ask you about your experience with a part time recruiter. What's the best way to get in touch with you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a brilliant idea - I just have this feeling something terrible is going to happen as a result of the scaling process. Something about posting event details to a public place...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'm glad you like it.

That's an even stronger concern with geolocation-type technologies that show your physical location live. It can get of creepy quickly, but I'm 100% with you. That being said, it's easier not to do something because you're worried something bad might happen. Take more risks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The website does not give any details on how this works. Neither does the About page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment>


How Do You Reference Check a VC? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/02/08/how-do-you-reference-check-a-vc/ <comment><USER2> I wish every startup founder would read this. I know someone who feels really screwed by his investor.

I'd also recommend this video of TheFunded's Adeo Ressi (at The Next Web Conference 2008), as he outlines a number of pitfalls to be aware of, too: <http://vimeo.com/1047702>

</comment><comment><USER3> This was great - well written, quality advice, an area not overly covered. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't forget the obvious of <http://www.thefunded.com/>, which is a site designed to keep tabs on VCs.</comment>


Tips to finish your Side Project - <AUTHOR> https://thomas-sojka.tech/6-tips-to-finish-your-side-project.html <comment><USER2> I have a feeling that you do side-projects because they provide you the autonomy and the ability to tinker that official projects and collaborative OSS don't. And it is part of this autonomy that allows you to up and leave anytime you don't feel like it, whereas you can't do that with say your office project. So why take away that distinct advantage that allows you to do these things in the first place. My only question is why are we self-commoditizing the only thing that is providing a sense of relief from what is already a measured activity ie., people(office) constantly telling us what to do, when to do, and what tools to use etc and how well we did in abiding by that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's different for me to build something small, and seeing how others use it is my biggest motivation.

Some of these side projects are apps that I built for one person only, and if I didn't finish them, I couldn't see the smile on the other person's face when they used their own personal app for the first time :-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> After a long struggle, I have managed to find a process that allows me to regularly finish my side projects instead of giving them up after a while. I have learned some lessons that I wanted to share and I hope that they will be helpful for others.</comment>


8-bit Turing complete computer made in Factorio - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/tVB9xOx <comment><USER2> it's not actually turing complete</comment>